Trajectories of Memory Intro

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Trajectories of Memory


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Trajectories of Memory:

Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaustin History and the Arts

Edited by

Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle

Cambridge Scholars Publishing


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Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts,Edited by Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle

This book first published 2008 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright 2008 by Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording orotherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-646-7, ISBN (13): 9781847186461


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ....................................................................................... vii

Introduction

Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle ..........................................ix

Part I:Acknowledging Personal Presence in the Embodied Nature of

Scholarship .....................................................................................................1

A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

Julia Baker .................................................................................................3

Part II:

Representations of the Holocaust in History...........................................13

Between the Known and the Could be Known: The Case of the

Escape from Auschwitz

Ruth Linn..................................................................................................15

Child Holocaust Survivors at Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmekThe Recorded

Tale UnrememberedMicha Balf................................................................................................41

The Impact of Jewish Soap and Lampshades on HolocaustRemembrance

Joachim Neander......................................................................................51

The Use of Nazi Symbols in Israel: The Politics of Holocaust Discourse

and MemoryDirk Michel ..............................................................................................79

Holocaust Survivors Attitudes toward Jewish Suicide: A PreliminaryExamination

Mark Mengerink ....................................................................................103

Place and Memory in Holocaust Survivor Oral HistoriesJamie Wraight ........................................................................................127

Voices, Visions, and Silence: Reflections on Listening to HolocaustSurvivors

Sidney Bolkosky ....................................................................................145


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Table of Contentsvi

Part III:

Representations of the Holocaust in the Arts ........................................157

The Golem Redux: Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish AmericanLiterature

Elisabeth Baer ........................................................................................159

Emigrant Narratives and their Devices in Spiegelman, Foer, and Sebald

Hans Kellner ..........................................................................................175

Towards an Extension of Memory: W. G. Sebald Reads Jean AmryMarkus Zisselsberger.............................................................................191

Spectral Topographies: Locating Auschwitz in W. G. SebaldsAusterlitz

and Stephan WackwitzsAn Invisible CountrySilke Horstkotte .....................................................................................225

Images and Imagination: Monika MaronsPavels Letters

Caroline Schaumann..............................................................................249

Fragments and Beyond: Childhood Trauma in Binjamin Wilkomirskis

and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidts Holocaust Testimonies and Life-

Writing

Julia Baker..............................................................................................279

Postmemory in Austrian Post-Holocaust Literature: Thomas Bernhards

Heldenplatzand Elfriede Jelineks TotenaubergChristine Kiebuzinska ...........................................................................313

The Creation and Representation of Postmodern Geschichtsraum inDie

Kinder der Toten

Maria-Regina Kecht ..............................................................................333

Performance of Memory: Diane SamuelsKindertransport,

Tim Blake Nelsons The Grey Zone, and Holocaust Representation

Charlene Gould and Jeffrey Myers.......................................................353

List of Contributors...................................................................................375

Index ............................................................................................................381


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Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society

and its director, Dr. Vivian Patraka, at Bowling Green State University,

for support of this project through various stages. The book grew out of a

conference of the same title that took place on the Bowling Green State

University campus in March 2006 and included featured speakers Mari-anne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Atina Grossmann, Henry Hank Greenspan,

and Ernest Michel, of the UJA (United Jewish Appeal) Federation of New

York. We would like to acknowledge the collegial efforts of Bowling

Green State Universitys Colleges of Arts and Sciences and of MusicalArts, the Graduate College and the School of Art, the Fine Arts Galleries

Center, the Ethnic Cultural Arts Program, the Department of German,

Russian, and East Asian Languages, the Graduate Policy History Program

in the Department of History, and the Department of Theatre and Film, as

well as the Robert H. Jackson Center of New York, for collaborating to

bring together so many engaged speakers to our campus for the confer-

ence. We also thank all the contributors to this volume.

Many thanks to the interdisciplinary research group or Cluster enti-

tled Remembering the Holocaust, also sponsored by the Institute for theStudy of Culture and Society at Bowling Green State University 2005

2007. Many of its members, graduate students, faculty, and administrative

staff generously volunteered their scholarly expertise and organizational

talents to make this conference a rich and rigorous exchange of ideas. A

heartfelt thanks to Bowling Green State Universitys Department German,

Russian & East Asian Languages, to the Department of History, and to the

Office of Sponsored Programs and Research for financial contributions

that have made the publication of this volume possible.

We would like to acknowledge the many reviewers for their thoughtfuland cogent comments in the vetting and editing process:

Bill Albertini, Bowling Green State University

Susan Anderson, University of Oregon

Douglas Forsyth, Bowling Green State University

Margy Gerber, Bowling Green State University

Beatrice Guenther, Bowling Green State University

Geoffrey Howes, Bowling Green State University

Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth University

Edgar Landgraf, Bowling Green State UniversityNancy Michael, Bemidji State University


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Acknowledgmentsviii

Manfred Mittermeyer, Universitt Salzburg

Mary Natvig, Bowling Green State University

Mark Polelle, University of FindlayNikhil Sathe, Ohio University

Marilyn Schrude, Bowling Green State University

Annelies Schulte Nordholt, Universiteit Leiden

John Sebestyen, Trinity Christian College

Joanna Stimmel, Middlebury College

Jennifer Taylor, College of William and Mary

Larry Wilcox, University of Toledo

Our translator in a pinch, Vincent Kling, of La Salle University.

Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to Carol Kou-

likourdi of Cambridge Scholars Press for guiding us through the publica-

tion process, and to Mary Fahnestock-Thomas for her careful editing and

formatting of this volume.

Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle

Bowling Green State University

Bowling Green, Ohio


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Trajectories of Memory:

Intergenerational Representations of theHolocaust in History and the Arts

Introduction

Christina Guenther and

Beth Griech-Polelle

In her lyrical and groundbreaking film essay Die papierene Brcke(The Paper Bridge 1987), Jewish Austrian filmmaker and essayist RuthBeckermann (b. 1952) tries to answer the question: Wer sind wir, Kinder

der zweiten Generation? Was macht uns aus? (Who are we, children of

the second generation? What characterizes us?).1

These questions about

identity and its articulations, we discover in her film and writing, are di-

rectly related to transgenerational or mediated trauma of the Holocaust. Inthe postwar Austrian context, children of Holocaust survivors, like Beck-

ermann, had to contend with a particular set of problems that led to their

sense of living in limbo, in a no-mans-land, invisible (Beckermann

1989, 117). Nationally sanctioned amnesia regarding Austrian culpability

in the persecution and destruction of fellow Jewish compatriots during the

Anschluss period contributed significantly to this sense of alienation anddeterritorialization. Moreover, Jews who emigrated or returned to Austria

after 1945 did so only with the intention of eventually emigrating to Israel

or North America. Furthermore, the acute trauma often kept Holocaustsurvivors from speaking about their experiences of the Holocaust, and thissilence was often especially disconcerting for their children. Thus, given

this complex politics of memory and the tension between past trauma and

its transgenerational mediation, the construction of identity has remained a

central preoccupation not only in Beckermanns films and writing, but for

artists of the second generation in Austria and beyond.

In The Paper Bridge Beckermann sets out toward Czernowitz (Cer-nauti), in the former Bukovina, her fathers birthplace, to mend the fragile

1 Here and throughout this book, all translations are by the respective authors un-

less stated otherwise.


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x Introduction

or destroyed bridges between past and present Jewish life across the chasm

of the Holocaust, and to seek out pictures and locations corresponding to

the stories about her forebears. Beckermann articulates absence and lossincurred by the Nazis deadly discrimination most poignantly with her

questions in the film: Gibt es Bilder zu den Geschichten, mit denen ich

aufgewachsen bin? (Are there pictures that correspond to the stories with

which I was raised?); Wie kann man in der Kindheit der Eltern ankom-

men? (How can one gain access to the childhood of ones parents?). Ul-

timately she recognizes that she can only approach but never fully reach

those sites, i.e., the locations of the stories of her Jewish heritage. She real-

izes, too, that the (pre-Holocaust) childhood of ones parents is physicallyinaccessible. Je nher, desto unerreichbarer (The closer one gets, the less

attainable it becomes), she concludes in her voiceover in the film. Clearly,

the passage of time has compounded, in a sense, Nazi attempts to erase

Jewish experience. Beckermanns film essays from the 1980s through

2006, then, represent what one might call trajectories of her memory work,

her struggle to bridge the temporal distance and counter the Jewish suffer-

ing and loss by engaging historical sources as well as familial stories, and

pairing both with intense reflection and imagination. Beckermanns life-

long project thus reflects a creative intersection of history and art and il-

lustrates the on-going challenge of finding appropriate forms for express-

ing absencedestruction, loss, and invisibilityas well as presence (see

Works Cited for further references). This was the point of departure for

our project as well.

The crisis of knowledge that is the legacy of the Holocaust and the

ever-incomplete process of making sense of this deadly discrimination and

its effects on the following generations are the focus of this volume. As

trauma specialists Dori Laub and Nanette C. Auerhahn conclude, too, in

their extensive research on trauma and memory, It is the nature of trauma

to elude our knowledge, because of both defense and deficit (Laub and

Auerhahn 1993, 288). Moreover, as those who experienced the Holocaustfirsthand become fewer and fewer, we turn our attention to how the next

generations meet their postmemorial obligation of co-witnessing (Hirsch

and Kacandes 2004, 18), defining, and representing the Holocaust forthemselves and for generations to come.

In March 2006 we invited scholars across academic disciplines

history, literature, theater studies, visual arts, political science, philosophy,

psychology, and sociologyto Bowling Green State University to explore

the continued effects of the Holocaust on the present, on the ways in

which the presentsixty years after the end of World War IIattempts tounderstand, (re-)define and represent received history or a vicarious


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Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust xi

past (Young 2000) and the implications of this memory work on the con-

struction of personal and national identities. For, as Andreas Huyssen so

directly states, the Holocaust has become a cipher for the twentieth cen-tury as a whole and for the failure of the project of enlightenment; it is

also a powerful prism through which we may look at other instances of

genocide (Huyssen 2003, 13). Moreover, since the discursive reign of

the Shoah in our collective imagination is as apparent as ever and recur-

rent metaphorical use of the Holocaust threatens to erase it, it is the task of

each generation to reflect on the ways in which we make sense of it and

represent it for future generations (Lentin 2004, 14).

A number of excellent studies of the Holocaust and its representationhave appeared in the last decade (Hirsch and Kacandes 2004; Hoffman

2004; McGlothlin 2006; Vice 2003; Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall

2003; Fuchs, Cosgrove and Grote 2006). The particular contribution of

this volume to the evolving Holocaust discourse lies in its attempt to jux-

tapose accounts of personal traumatic memory and collective memory,

historical and artistic representations of the Holocaust, and German, Aus-

trian, Israeli, and American perspectives. Thus, in addition to their attempt

to provide an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, the contribu-

tions as a whole reflect on the particularities of generationally inflected

Holocaust writing and representation.2 All contributors to this volume are

particularly cognizant of the fact that sixty years after the end of World

War II, this past is inherited not experienced, i.e., a shadow, even the

uncanny in Eva Hoffmans words (66), yet that there is no closure no

Final Solution to the question of representation with regard to the Holo-

caust (Lentin 2004, 19). Furthermore, as Vivian Patraka notes in her study

of Holocaust theater, representations of the Holocaust are a mark of

goneness, and representing it is a process, an ongoing struggle, an ongo-

ing performance (Patraka 1999, 4) in which we have a moral and peda-

gogical obligation to engage.

We chose the word trajectories for our conference and volume titlebecause memories (and their representations in the arts and in the social

sciences) are not linear but multidimensional, fluid, even palimpsested,

and often with no discernable destination. Personal and collective memo-ries in particular meander, sometimes converging or antithetical, even dis-

placed or forgotten. As Kerwin Lee Klein reminds us in his cogent study

On the Emergence ofMemory in Historical Discourse, memory is also asocial phenomenon that is located in rules, laws, standardized proce-

2 At our conference in March 2006, Irene Kacandes proposed this term as an alter-

native to second- or even third-generation Holocaust literature.


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xii Introduction

dures, and records books, holidays, statues, souvenirs Memory is

not a property of individual minds, but a diverse and shifting collection of

material artifacts and social practices (Klein 2000, 130). It is our inten-tion in this volume to examine and compare the most current trends in the

discourse of memory in Holocaust studies as articulated in the two disci-

plines of history and literary studies.

This interdisciplinary collection of articles on the Holocaust begins,

appropriately enough, with an interview with Marianne Hirsch and Leo

Spitzer, two of the keynote speakers at the conference, conducted by Julia

Baker during the symposium. Both Hirsch, a scholar of literary and cul-

tural studies, and Spitzer, a historian, reflect on the intersection of disci-plines and on locating their subjective voices and personal/familial memo-

ries within their professional academic research. Their latest joint project

on the Holocaust, a co-authored book forthcoming under the title Ghostsof Home: The Afterlife of a City in Jewish Memory and Postmemory, in-vestigates points of memory as Hirsch and Spitzer frame their approach

to archival photographs, evidence that is paradoxically both concrete and

ambiguous, and a resource for objective and emotional truths of the past

(2006a; see also 2006b). Beyond emphasizing the interconnectedness of

personal and professional biographies, the link between the embodied

being and his or her presence in scholarship, they pose crucial questions

regarding the impact and purpose of Holocaust memory work with regard

to atrocities in todays world. Finally, they continue their own discussions

of how to read photographs in both historical and literary contexts, an en-

terprise in memory studies that brings together private and public spheres,

presences and absences, always also stretching the historical imagination.

The first section of the volume, Trajectories of Memory in History,

presents new research by historians on the intersection between memory

and history, two terms that, although often used synonymously in histori-

cal writing, represented antitheses until some two decades ago, when they

began to be yoked together in a supplemental relationship (Klein 2000,128). Historians base their craft on many different components, and per-

haps one of the most compelling yet elusive of these continues to be mem-

ory. Personal memories, contained in diaries or memoirs, in trial testimo-nies, in newspaper interviewsall of these move us and help us to under-

stand the reality of a time we did not experience directly for ourselves. Yet

we also know that many memories, as social practices, are silenced, while

still others are never recorded and are almost entirely lost to us.


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Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust xiii

Representations of the Holocaust in History

In her essay, Between the Known and the Could be Known: TheCase of the Escape from Auschwitz, Ruth Linn addresses the efforts of

two men, Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler, who managed to escape from the

concentration camp together in April 1944 and sought to inform the worldabout what was taking place there. Together they wrote a thirty-page re-

port describing the gassings, the executions, and the starvation of inmates

at Auschwitz and submitted their findings to Jewish leaders still alive in

Slovakia, who then assured the two men that the report would be dissemi-

nated to the rest of the world. The Vrba-Wetzler Report was the first

document about Auschwitz to reach the free world and to be accepted ascredible. What became of the Vrba-Wetzler report and why do so few

people know of its existence? And, more importantly, why dont many

people know that two Jewish men did the unthinkableescaped from

Auschwitz successfully? Linn has examined the fate of the story of Vrba

and Wetzler among the Israeli public and in Hebrew school textbooks. She

asks, Why was such an unprecedented heroic act in Jewish history absentfrom the narrative of the Israeli collective Holocaust memory? Further-

more, after Linn met with Vrba and interviewed him, she wondered why

his memoir was not available in Hebrew and what the possible agenda wasbehind this silence. Her work reveals that the story of Vrba and Wetzlers

escape and their subsequent efforts to inform and warn Jews conflicted

with a hegemonic Holocaust narrative of Jews who disbelieved the infor-

mation, even when it was given to them, and thus went like sheep to the

slaughter.

In the essay Child Survivors at Kibbutz HaEmekThe Recorded

Tale Unremembered, Micha Balf reconstructs the process of forgetting a

memory. Beginning in the mid-1940s child survivors of the Holocaust

were arriving at Kibbutz HaEmek, most of them orphans. The kibbutz

community welcomed these children and, in the course of their schooling,

encouraged each child to record her or his memories, which were then

published in pamphlet form and distributed throughout the kibbutz. Yet in

the year 2000 not one person on the kibbutz remembered any of these

pamphlets. All of those interviewed insisted that survivors never spoke

about their experiences. Silence was etched into their collective memory.

Balf asks, How was this possible? The community leaders of the kibbutz

had been very well-informed regarding the destructive process in Europe

and had held numerous commemorative events in 1943, 1944, 1945, and

1946. This commemorative process was crowned by the installation of the

first memorial site on a kibbutz and in Israel overall: the Gola Corner,


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xiv Introduction

which was dedicated to the deceased children lost during the Holocaust. It

represented a site of bereavement and mourning, and that is how the well-

documented memories of surviving children were lost. In the kibbutzscommunal narrative only the dead were honored; living children and their

stories of survival did not fit into this commemorative act. Balf traces a

process of collective amnesia in which individual stories are forever lost in

a collective narrative that seems to have no place for them.

Joachim Neander discusses two legends, namely that the bodies of

Jews were turned into soap on an industrial scale in Nazi Germany and

that the skin of the victims of the Holocaust was transformed into lamp-

shades. He shows how these stories first appeared as rumors and that, de-spite having long since been refuted by serious scholars, the idea of soap

and lampshades made out of victims of the Holocaust has taken on a life

of its own, almost as an urban legend, consistently reappearing. These

accepted truths have appeared in political speeches, in artworks, in gen-

eral histories, in popular culture, and even in displays in museums dedi-

cated to the Holocaust. The underlying danger, as Neander points out, is

that once such legends have been proven as false, Holocaust deniers and

revisionists seek to use that information to question the veracity of

genocide in general.

In The Use of Nazi Symbols in Israel, Dirk Michel shows how Holo-

caust memory and the Israeli discourse of nation-building began as a sort

of founding mythology of the Israeli state, and how over time the political

use of both Holocaust discourse and Holocaust memory has been

employed for political ends by the Israeli government and by their oppo-

nents. Beginning with the founding legends of the Israeli state, Michel ar-

gues that the events chosen to be included in the collective memory have

been designed to refute the image of the weak Jew, and that likewise the

institutionalization of memory, such as at Yad Vashem, have demon-

strated again the connection between the Holocaust, the new state of Is-

rael, and fighting against the idea of Jewish weakness. Finally, Micheltracks the rise of Holocaust discourse in Israeli political life, from David

Ben-Gurion likening Arabs to Nazis, to settlers in Gaza resisting evacua-

tion by the Israeli army and comparing themselves to deportees of theWarsaw Ghetto and the military to the Gestapo. Through numerous exam-

ples such as these, Michel seeks to encourage self-reflection in the politi-

cal arena of Israeli politics.

How do survivors relate their memories? What do they choose to pre-

serve in writing and what is revealed in oral interviews? The essays by

Mark Mengerink and Jamie Wraight explore the various ways in whichHolocaust survivors remember certain elements of their experiences.


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Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust xv

Given Western civilizations Judeo-Christian heritage, which holds that all

life is holy and that taking ones own life is a deadly sin, it is not surpris-

ing that for many survivors, the topic of suicide is taboo. Nevertheless,Mengerink breaks this taboo and analyzes Holocaust survivor attitudes

toward the act of suicide, revealing a broad spectrum of responsesfrom

condemnation of such cowardice, to admiration of such resistance, to

ambivalence depending on the intent and/or the after-effects of the suicide.

In most of the cases examined by Mengerink, practicing what Lawrence

Langer terms deep memory has been avoided, in some cases to the point

where the person who committed suicide has no name. It also becomes

clear that an investigator might learn quite different things from reading amemoir and from sitting down to discuss the topic of suicide in an oral

history interview. In many cases, Mengerink has found that even when in-

terviewees bring up the topic of suicide, their responses are limited or un-

focused.

Jamie Wraights essay confirms that the results of a written narrative

and an oral history interview can be very different and considers the influ-

ence of geographical place in eliciting memory, because so many survi-

vors narratives build their story around a specific landscape. His findings

suggest that in written memoirs or in diaries the description of the concen-

trationary universe is presented as a neat and tidy landscape, filled with

barracks, guard towers, barbed wire fences, and sometimes the crematoria

and gas chambers. Its social landscape is peopled with guards, Kapos,

prisoners, and even civilian workers. The reader is struck by the sense of a

place of order and detachment. Oral history, on the other hand, is able to

capture the chaos, the uncertainty, and the absolute terror of the experi-

ence, and the listener often receives a deeper, more visceral experience of

the concentration camp universe. In Wraights opinion, the oral history

interview provides its audience with images, rather than concepts as pre-

sented in written accounts.

Sidney Bolkosky urges all researchers to pay careful attention to whatsurvivors are trying to express in oral history narratives. Both the speaker

and the listener immediately experience the poverty of language to express

the memory, and the narrative may not flow in a straight line, may seemdisorderly, as the interviewee considers How can I tell you about this?

Bolkosky urges listeners to observe the silences and acknowledge the

flood of memories as the survivor struggles to find adequate expression

for his/her experience. He suggests that perhaps, because of the inability of

language to capture the enormity of the actual experiences of Holocaust

survivors, our comprehension, at best, must rely on fragments of theirmemories and deep, eloquent silence.


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xvi Introduction

Representations of the Holocaust in

Contemporary Fiction and Theater

In their important interdisciplinary collection of articles Teaching theRepresentation of the Holocaust (2004), Marianne Hirsch and IreneKacandes emphasize that access to the Holocaust for the generations born

after 1945 is not only multiply mediated. In their words, the Holocaust

can provide some of the most sophisticated interrogations of representabil-

ity, of the limits of art, of speech in the face of unspeakability, and of the

intersection of ethics and aesthetics (7). By retrieving and reflecting on

gaps, even lapses and incongruence between personal and collective

memory and forgotten testimonial documents in the first section of thisvolume, historians point to the constructed and socially structured charac-

teristic of not only collective historical narratives but also personal memo-

ries, and explore the different ideological trajectories of Holocaust dis-

course in Israel, Central Europe, and North America.

In the second section of this volume, scholars in literary, cultural, and

theater studies again examine the way in which Holocaust discourse has

continued to develop in various cultural and national contexts and across

generations at the turn of the twenty-first century. The contributions ad-

dress the following questions: How do artists, scholars, and teachers nego-tiate the language of the Holocaust as survivors die, leaving future genera-

tions to respond to the dictum: Never again? How do children and grand-

children of survivors, perpetrators, even bystanders transmit the difficultlegacy of the Holocaust in the German and Austrian context while navigat-

ing feelings of transgenerational guilt or victimhood? How can we do jus-

tice to survivor testimony when the survivors can no longer speak directly

or mediate the testimony to us? How does transferred and multiply medi-

ated knowledge translate into meaningful artifacts for the next generations,

so that they might have a significant impact on national and even globalunderstanding of genocide? To what extent can members of the genera-

tions without lived experience of the Holocaust represent it adequately and

responsibly?

In the first article, on reappropriations of the Golem legend in the last

decade, Elizabeth Baer explores Jewish fiction and its narrative particu-

larities in the decades after the Holocaust, calling into question Adornosinjunction that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Taking the lead from

literary critics Geoffrey Hartman and Sue Vice, Baer explores how inter-

textuality as a postmodern device and concept calls into question how sto-

ries or texts reflect reality and creates a tentative continuity across the di-

vide caused by atrocities. In her words, intertextuality as a concept can be


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Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust xvii

said to instantiate the disruption, induced by the Holocaust, of our notions

of human nature, evil, and history-as-progress, of meaning itself. In in-

vestigating reanimations of the Golem story as a paradoxical symbol ofJewish imaginative creation, Baer sets out to demonstrate how American

writers such as Cynthia Ozick, Pete Hamill, Daniel Handler, and Michael

Chabon and Thane Rosenbaum affirm a text-centered, moral Jewish tradi-

tion in the post-Holocaust era.3

Hans Kellner extends this discussion of the covenant of contemporary

Jewish literature by posing the question of authorial ethics with regard to

Holocaust representation. In other words, he explores recent artistic Holo-

caust representations in terms of their historicity, subject to the changesin passions of historical interest. Kellner identifies an artistic device he

calls emigrant narratives prevalent in second- and third-generation art

that captures the tension between lived trauma, which while authentic is

becoming regretfully inaccessible as the survivor generation passes, and

the possibility of new modes of Holocaust representations that might fill

the void and redefine the relation between past and present. Kellner under-

stands these emigrant narratives as nomadic devices that reflect a drifting

of discourse through time, spreading the origin farther and farther afield,

even as that origin is released and progressively clouded. He provides

various examples of nomadic devices, ways in which successive genera-

tions negotiate meaning and represent the Holocaust. Kellner finds that Art

Spiegelman uses (oedipal) masking in his double-volumed comic strip

Maus, Jonathan Safran Foer adopts thesaural doubling in his 2002 novelEverything Is Illuminated, Sebald semantic drift in Austerlitz (2001), andall thereby dramatize the witnessing of the witness without arriving at a

clear-cut conclusion.

In the next two articles, both Markus Zisselsberger and Silke Horst-

kotte provide close and rich readings of W. G. Sebalds Austerlitz in jux-taposition to a second German-speaking author. In his reading of Sebalds

novel, Zisselsberger emphasizes the interconnectedness of the ethics andaesthetics of testimony on the part of the postmemorial subject. He ex-

plores the question of how Sebald attempts in his literary scholarship and

3 Interestingly, Cathy S. Gelbin concludes about the literary Golem trope in Ger-

man and Austrian Jewish writing of the 1990s that although [a] figure of destruc-

tion and messianic rebirth, the Golem now embodies the resistance, continuity, and

revival of Jewish culture in Europe after the genocide and Cold War ideological

divides (Fuchs, Cosgrove, and Grote 2006).


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xviii Introduction

fiction to allow witnesses of the Holocaust, specifically Austrian-born

writer and Holocaust survivor Jean Amry, to speak. How do we, belong-

ing to the generations who did not witness the Holocaust, arrive at an ethi-cal mode of reading in which we do not simply appropriate experiences

that we did not live, in order to extend memory into the present? Zis-

selsberger identifies the trope of travel coupled with narration as dialogic

exchange as Sebalds mode to access Amrys traumatic and incommuni-

cable memories and experiences in Austerlitz. In Zisselsbergers words,what Sebald passes on to the reader in Austerlitz through its dislocationsand intertextual detours [that] gather the remnants of the past and

search the traces of traumatic life-histories [is] the ethical and imaginativeinvestment that Amry and, more particularly, his texts demanded from

the reader (14). By way of this intertextual extension the reader is

called upon to confront the incommunicability of trauma.

By contrasting SebaldsAusterlitz with Stephan Wackwitzs 2003 Einunsichtbares Land. Ein Familienroman (An Invisible Country 2006),Horstkotte, by contrast, explores yet another dimension. The central ques-

tion of her article revolves around locating Auschwitz in these two post-

memorial texts, post-Wall novels written as the New Berlin Republic is

negotiating a renewed national identity grounded in a responsible official

memorial culture. Horstkotte, like Zisselsberger, highlights the signifi-

cance of the trope of travel and its relationship to both time and

space/location inAusterlitz andAn Invisible Country. Indeed, in her read-ings of the novels, Horstkotte excavates the ways and processes by which

memory [and forgetting are] mapped onto the topography of post-war

Europe in both. She also reflects on the varied uses of photography and

its attendant association with the spectral, haunted past and the uncanny in

each text. In both novels she recognizes that Auschwitz, while represent-

ing an enigmatic, difficult-to-pinpoint cipher whose meaning must con-

tinue to be investigated, remains at the center of not only German but

European (socio-political) topography.In her article on another contemporary East/West German author,

Monika Maron, Caroline Schaumann considers the integration of family

photography in autobiographical fiction about the Holocaust in the NewBerlin Republic. For Schaumann, Marons Pavels Briefe (1999; Pavels

Letters 2002) is particularly central to a discussion about traumatic mem-ory and transgenerational suffering and guilt, because it deals with the

complex legacy of perpetratorship, bystanders, and victimhood within one

familys trajectory of memories. For Schaumann, Maron engages in the

extension of postmemory in reflecting on a bi-generational voice andimagination. The narrator must navigate her own, her mothers (postwar


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Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust xix

GDR communist) and her grandfathers (Jewish communist) perspectives.

Having never met the grandfather who was killed by the Nazis, the narra-

tor can only access his life through the memory and memorylessness ofher mother and through documents and photographs bequeathed to her by

her dead grandfather. Again, location and travel are significant in the ex-

cavation and representation of Jewish devastation and absence. And de-

spite documents and family photographs, authentic memories, the narra-

tor realizes, are impossible to access. What can be remembered entails the

engaged imagination in the present of each generation to come, as demon-

strated by Marons narrator inPavels Letters.Julia Bakers contribution to representations of the Holocaust in the

arts problematizes the notion of authenticity in relation to traumatic expe-

rience and autobiographical writing as she turns to two texts about child-

hood trauma, one fictional and the other defictionalized. She juxtaposes

Bruno Grosjean/Dssekkers, a.k.a. Binjamin Wilkomirskis, controversial

and fictional account of a childhood Holocaust survivor, Fragments:Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1996; published in 1995 in Germanunder the title Bruchstcke. Aus einer Kindheit 19391948), and Frenchauthor and child Holocaust survivor Georges-Arthur Goldschmidts recent

autobiography ber die Flsse (Across the Rivers; French 1999, Germantranslation 2001). Baker explores the production of life-writing in each.

Grosjean/Dssekker resorted to fictionalizing his trauma into a convincing

Holocaust memoir. Baker observes that Goldschmidt, by contrast, trans-

formed his traumatic memories into a series of fictionalized texts only to

succeed, finally, in arriving at what Baker terms a defictionalized life

story with his most recent work. Situating her discussion of these two texts

in psychological and sociological discussions of childhood trauma and textproduction, she concludes that the initial success ofFragments as a Holo-caust memoir has to do with its convincing adherence to an established

form of Holocaust testimony, a seemingly authentic therapeutic practice

of making sense of traumatic memory. Baker shows how workingthrough trauma is, however, a much more complex matter. Goldschmidt

was engaged in a thirty-year process of fictional memory writing, a proc-

ess by which he ultimately only slowly reenactedthus interpretedhis

own traumatic life story, his mode of working through the atrocity.

Both Christine Kiebuzinska and Maria-Regina Kecht provide engaging

discussions of the way in which two of the most significant Austrian writ-

ers critique Austrian postwar cultural politics, with its collective amnesiaregarding its involvement in the atrocities committed against Jewish com-

patriots during the Third Reich. Kiebuzinska demonstrates how ThomasBernhards Heldenplatz, written during the commemorative year 1988,


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xx Introduction

fifty years after the Anschluss, and Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelineks1991 Totenauberg represent postmodern enactments of postmemory.

Kiebuzinska illuminates Bernhards and Jelineks dramatic strategies ofcritique. Bernhard, for Kiebuzinska, highlights ahistorical stasis and the

pervasive contemporary fascist discourse in Austrian politics and media

through his use of narrative circularity and the repetition of historic tropes,

while Jelinek cleverly utilizes a palimpsest of landscapes (Alpine to

Auschwitz), with its disconcerting associations with Austrian nationalist

identity discourses.

In her reading of Elfriede Jelineks very dense and complex 1995

novelDie Kinder der Toten (Children of the Dead), Maria-Regina Kechtalso recognizes Jelineks narrative strategy of deconstructing the relation-

ship between landscape and Austrian understanding ofHeimat(homeland)and identity. For Kecht, Jelinek creates her most sophisticated critique of

the dominant historical/mental space, a collective Geschichtsraumfounded on the legacy of multi-ethnic Habsburg and, despite the various

commemorative ceremonies in 1988, denies or distorts the historical real-

ity of anti-Semitism and the persecution and murder of Austrian Jewish

compatriots in the late 1930s and 1940s. Kecht explores how Jelinek

counters official Austrian collective memory(lessness) in her postmodern

novelby solidly anchor[ing] intertextual play in extratextual historicalevents, an aesthetic strategy on the level of lexic, discourse, story, and

history that never allows for closure. Kecht identifies Jelineks project of

continually deconstructing and reframing Austrians historical conscious-

ness, the ideological nature of landscapes, so central to the notion of na-

tional identity in Austria, as moral commitment to justice and tolerance.

The final contribution to this volume merges theory and practice most

directly in Holocaust memory work while also successfully blending the

disciplines of history and theater studies. Charlene Gould and Jeffrey

Myers reflect on their collaborative work in the recent stagings of two

Holocaust dramas, Diane SamuelsKindertransport(1995) and Tim BlakeNelsons The Grey Zone (1998) at Avila University in Missouri, as ameans of re-presenting traumatic memory of the Holocaust at a time when

the survivors are no longer accessible. Their pedagogy of Holocaust mem-ory engaged students in serious study of historical documents coupled

with creative imaginings, active involvement in constructing collective

and individual memories of trauma, and a commitment to secondary wit-

nessing through a dialogic performance where the community of specta-

tors is encouraged to participate in the performative experience of trauma

through talk-back sessions.


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Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust xxi

Bearing in mind the cross-cultural and transnational interest in this

type of study and the importance of language in the construction of ideas,

we have chosen to include quotations in the original language with theEnglish translation in the body of the articles unless otherwise indicated.

This collection in no way represents a completed process of memory work

in Holocaust studies. The transcultural, transgenerational, and interdisci-

plinary perspectives only highlight the need for a continued engagement

with the study of the Holocaust and its impact on the way in which we

perceive our communities and the responsibilities we have toward future

generations.

Works Cited

Beckermann, R. 1987.Die papierene Brcke (The Paper Bridge). 16 mm;91 min. Austria: Aichholzer Film.

. 1989. Unzugehrig: Juden und sterreicher nach 1945. Vienna:Lcker Verlag.

Fuchs, M., M. Cosgrove, and G. Grote, eds. 2006. German Memory Con-

tests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since1990. Rochester: Camden House.Gelbin, C. S. 2006. Of Stories and Histories: Golem Figures in Post-1989

German and Austrian Culture. In Fuchs, Cosgrove, and Grote 2006,193207.

Hirsch, M., and I. Kacandes, eds. 2004. Teaching the Representation ofthe Holocaust. New York: MLA.

Hirsch, M., and L. Spitzer. 2006a. Strolling the Herrengasse: Street Pho-

tographs in Archival and Personal Memory. Paper presented at the

conference Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representa-tions of the Holocaust in History and the Arts, Bowling Green State

University, March 2006.

. 2006b. Whats Wrong with This Picture?: Archival Narratives in

Contemporary Narratives. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5.2:22952.

Hoffman, E. 2004.After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Leg-acy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs.

Huyssen, A. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics ofMemory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.


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xxii Introduction

Klein, K. L. 2000. On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Dis-

course.Representations: Special Issue on Grounds for Remembering

69 (Winter): 12750.Laub, D., and N. C. Auerhahn. 1993. Knowing and Not Knowing Mas-

sive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory. InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis 74: 287302.

Lentin, R., ed. 2004. Re-Presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century. NewYork: Berghahn Books.

McGlothlin, E. 2006. Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legaciesof Survival and Perpetration. Rochester, NY: Camden House.

Patraka, V. M. 1999. Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and theHolocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Vice, S., ed. 2003. Representing the Holocaust. London: VallentineMitchell.

Welzer, H., S. Moller, and K. Tschuggnall. 2003. Opa war kein Nazi:Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedchtnis. Frankfurta. M.: Fischer Verlag.

Young, J. 2000. At Memorys Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust inContemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress.


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Part I:

Acknowledging Personal Presencein the

Embodied Nature of Scholarship


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25/30

A Conversation with

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

Julia Baker

This interview was conducted at the conferenceTrajectories of Memory:

Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the

Arts, held at Bowling Green, Ohio, United States, 2326 March 2006.

JULIA K. BAKER: I am always surprised at how much both of you share

about your personal lives in your academic work. I have never come

across anybody else who reveals so many personal details, photographs,

letters, and memories in their writing. From my point of view as a reader,this is one of the many aspects that make your work so approachable and

attractive. Have you always written like that, or how did this writing dev-

elop? Do you sometimes regret your strong presence in your texts?

LEO SPITZER: I have not always written like that. I am a historian and,

generally speaking, academic historians tend to avoid the personal voice.In orthodox academic historical practice, the historian is not supposed to

be evident in the text. Such historical work is characterized by a seamless

narrative and impersonal, omniscient, historical voiceby the avoidance

of the historians personal voice, and a masking of the constructed nature

of historical inquiry and writing. What happened was that I began to resist

these conventionsthese presentations of an omniscient, objective, his-torical voice devoid of personality and subjectivity. I wanted to show how

the historian is invested in the construction of a historical accounthow

he or she shapes and constructs it as an embodied being, with a subjectiv-ity and personal history that need to be taken into account. So I therefore

began to introduce my personal voice into my historical writing.

In the first book I wrote, The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Reactions to

Colonialism [1974], my personal voice is actually not very evident in the

narrative text. But when I started working on my second book, Lives in

Between [1990], I became very interested in comparing Jewish emancipa-

tion, assimilation, and exclusion with that of Africans and Afro-Brazilians

over the course of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

My idea was to carry out that analysis through comparative family history.And in the early stages of my research an incredible thing happened.

Searching for materials on Jewish families on whom I might focus, I went


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A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer4

to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York to see what, in their rich archival

holdings, they might have on the family of Stefan Zweig, who had been

one of my parents favorite authors. When I examined their catalogue, Ifound that, among other holdings, they owned a Zweig family genealogy.

But the catalogue reference I had found read: for Zweig, see Spitzer.

This was so weird.

The explanation for this of course was that in the eighteenth century,

Zweigs and Spitzers had intermarried in the Habsburg realmand, indeed,

when I then began to unravel the genealogy of that family and to expand

on it, I realized that I was researching not only the story of the family of

Stefan Zweig, but also that of a branch of my own family. And I becameso personally invested and involved in that story that I felt that my per-

sonal voice needed to be apparent in the book I was writing. And after

completing that book I decided that my voice should certainly be visible in

my subsequent work,Hotel Bolivia [1999], which is a book about Jewish

emigration to Latin America in the era of World War IIa story in which

I was both a personal participant and of which I became a historian. And

in the aftermath of that bookat this pointI can no longer conceive of

writing history without acknowledging my personal presence.

So there you go, a very long answer to a short question.

MARIANNE HIRSCH: I probably have a long answer for you, too. No, Idid not always write that way, because that is not how we were taught towrite at all. When I was first in college and graduate school, we did not

even use I in our papers, and in fact I grew up with New Criticism and

structuralism, so even the authors of the literary works we were writing

about remained almost anonymous. We were interested in the text, which

was not even historically contextualized. The authors biography was not

important, and then, in structuralism, there was the death of the author in

favor of the text. Its really been a long route from then to where I am

now.On the other hand, I would say that almost everything I have written

and published has been personal. My dissertation was about exile and

emigration, about how different worlds interact with one another in the

space of narrative. As an immigrant myself, I closely identified with

Henry Jamess, Michel Butors, and Uwe Johnsons characters and with

the narrative choices the authors made. Later, when I became involved in

feminist work, I wrote about mothers and daughters, and that also was

very personal. Mostly the personal part was in the introduction and pref-

ace; the rest was a theoretical and literary discussion of mothers anddaughters.


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Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust 5

It was when I started working on family photography that I found that

you could not analyze that genre without actually looking at your own

photographs. To account for the power of these objects, of why a smallsquare of paper is invested with so much affect, we really have to look at

our own family images and think about them closely. And that is where

the self-revelation and the more autobiographical writing came in for me,

and became important not only to do, but also to interrogate.

But of course none of this is separate from what was happening in the

world of scholarship at large: I think there has to be a permission to do

that kind of work. When we first started to do that, we were actually fel-

lows at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and we wereinvolved in a seminar on personal criticism and personal scholarship. We

read a lot of examples and talked about them. It was a moment: Alice Kap-

lan had publishedFrench Lessons, for example, and Nancy K. MillerGet-

ting Personal. There were some who were very skeptical; they thought

this kind of writing to be too narcissistic, too exhibitionist. By reading ex-

amples, you could tell that often there is a very fine line of saying too

much or too little.

And, as you said, using personal material to make a larger theoretical

point, or just telling the story for its own sakein which case it is some-

thing elseis not an easy thing to do. But people were really beginning to

do that in the 90s; and there was also the question: who had the permis-

sion to do that? Do you have to have tenure, for example? For me it comes

out of feminist theory and understanding that the personal is the political

and the personal is the scholarly. I believe in the embodied nature of

scholarship. So I am a great advocate of it, but I dont think that the auto-

biographical element is essential.

You know, I was the editor of PMLA for the last three years, and I am

reading a lot of scholarly work, and mostly it is not at all autobiographical.

I always look for the story of a mind working through a problem even if I

dont know the personal story of that person. You really want to feel thatscholarly work is grounded in some way in the world. That is what I

would advocate. And I dont think that I will always write like that, but I

will always write about things that I care deeply about, and in that sense Iwill be in them.

JULIA K. BAKER (to MARIANNE HIRSCH): In your article Past Lives:

Postmemories in Exile [1996] you wrote about your efforts to organize a

trip for yourself and your parents back to Czernowitz, how you kept

checking back with them, and how you finally found out that they reallydid not want to go. During your keynote address on Thursday [Strolling

the Herrengasse: Street Photographs in Archival and Personal Memory,


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held on 23 March], it was nice to learn that your parents apparently did

eventually go back with you. I thought it was also interesting to see the

photo you took of your parents in the Herrengasse. How does this photo(in which they are standing) compare to those that show them strolling the

Herrengasse as a young couple? And a more general question to both of

you: How does your current book project fit into this idea of a return?

MARIANNE HIRSCH: Thats interesting. When we took the photo of

them in 1998, I dont think we were consciously thinking of all those other

street photos particularly. But somehow, through some lucky stroke, we

took it around the same spot that they were taken by street photographers

in the 1920s, 30s, and early 40s. The Herrengasse was a Begriffof

course we went right there and they told us about it; it was an obviousplace to take a photo of my parents. Perhaps we were thinking of that little

picture of them in the same spot in 1942, during the worst time of persecu-

tion, subliminally, because that picture was in the album, but we had not

really investigated it or thought about it. Our link to it, in 1998, was just a

subliminal pull.

LEO SPITZER: That photo, actually, was taken with a video camera. So

we do have them walking on the Herrengasse as well. We can animate the

photo.

JULIA K. BAKER (to MARIANNE HIRSCH): What do you think of your

parents in the photo from 1998?

MARIANNE HIRSCH: Well, it is a completely different moment in their

lives. Not only have they changed, but the place has changed as well. You

can see it even in the photohow quiet it is, how little street activity there

is. It was much more lively in the 30s; there were more stores, more peo-

ple, more activity, and in 1998 it was a very quiet place. Then when we

went back in 2000, it was more lively again. But yes, we went on that trip;

it was probably related to my parents reading the article you mentioned

and they said, I guess you really want to go. And we also found out

through other people that the trip was not as complicated as we had

thought. It was a great trip; they loved it. We actually wrote an article

about the trip; it is called We would not have gone without you.

JULIA K. BAKER (to MARIANNE HIRSCH, then to LEO SPITZER): You

turned over the old photo of your parents to find the year in which it was

taken. This process of turning the photo over to find something so interest-

ing and to make it the basis for a scholarly investigation is something Ifound Prof. Spitzer also did in The Album and the Crossing [1999].

Didnt you also turn a photo over and find something new and interesting?


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Trajectories of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust 7

Have you come to turn all old photos over to look at their backsides?

Could you reflect on that process? Do you think of yourself as a detective?

LEO SPITZER: Yes, thats right, I first wrote about turning photos in apiece that subsequently became part of a chapter inHotel Bolivia. There I

had been puzzled by a series of photos in an album that my parents had

put together of their shipboard crossing from Europe to South America in

1939photos, in effect, of their forced emigration from Nazi Austria to

Bolivia. There was a tremendous incongruity in those photos between

what they appeared to depicta relatively pleasant voyage aboard the Ital-

ian Lines SS Virgilio, and the reality that they were in fact refugees who

not only had just escaped the horrors of post-Anschluss Austria, but who

were also in mourning for my grandfather Leopold, who had died aboardthe very ship on which they were traveling.

It was only when I accidentally turned the photos over, after trying to

remount and fix them more securely in the old album, that I found my fa-

thers handwritten comments that totally contradicted the pleasant images

the photos seemed to reflect. This clearly demonstrated what seems like an

obvious point, but one very often missed: that when we read photos for

the historical evidence they might provide, we need to read them not just

for their indexicalityfor their connection to something that stood before

the camera lens in the pastbut also for what they dont show, or mask,or hide. In a sense, I guess, when we remain aware of that and try to readimages beyond their frame and beyond the apparent, we are doing a form

of detective work.

JULIA K. BAKER: You are working on a book together. Are you going

to do that again? Do you work well together?

LEO SPITZER: A book project is a big undertaking, and I hope that we

are reaching the conclusion of this project by the end of this year. It has

been a rich and fascinating experience for me because Marianne and Ihave very different working styles. And in order to work together, we had

to adjust our practices. I tend to be a slow writer. It has always been diffi-

cult for me to go on to a next sentence before I feel that the previous sen-

tence is rightwell written and reflective of my intent. When I com-

plete a piece, I dont like to revise very much; I revise and revise again

while I am in the process of creation. Marianne works much faster, com-

pletes more than I do in a session, and revises in subsequent drafts. I think

that in the course of our collaboration, however, we have influenced each

other, and we have managed to work out a writing practice that seems towork well and that leaves both of us satisfied.


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I feel very fortunate to be married to a partner with whom I enjoy col-

laborating intellectually, and to be immersed with her creatively in a pro-

ject in which we share similar backgrounds and to which we bring differ-ent disciplinary training. I am of course not from Czernowitz, the place we

are writing about, nor is my family. Her family is from there. But I do

have an Austrian-Habsburg background (Czernowitz was the capital of the

Habsburg province of the Bukowina), and the experience of Jewish eman-

cipation, assimilation, and emigration that is so central to the story of

Czernowitz Jews is extremely familiar to me from both my work on Vien-

nese Jews and from my own family history. In my work on Czernowitz

that historical and familial background has been incredibly influential.And for me personally it has been a tremendous advantage to benefit

from Mariannes literary imagination and theoretical sophisticationto

look at things in a different way, and to learn how to read documents and

visual materials in a manner that is different from the way a historian

might approach them. Collaboration has been a great and rich learning ex-

perience for me. When we finish this project, I look forward to working

together again, perhaps not on such a large project, but on many more

smaller ones.

MARIANNE HIRSCH: Yes, our work came together in our previous two

books. I was working on family photography and Leo was working onHo-tel Bolivia. And I am not sure whether he would have done so much withthe photos if I had not looked at photos all the time. And my own work,

until very recently, has not been particularly historically inflected. I just

did not really know how to do that kind of research and how to write his-

torical narratives; as I told you, I was not really trained that way. I have

learned to pay much more attention, and to learn.

When we first started doing this, we were worried because we do have

such different writing styles, but the adjustment has been great. It has been

really exciting. I am not sure whether we will do another book together,but I am sure there will be articles and smaller pieces. And now we get

invitations and we drag each other along and say, do this with me.

Somehow it feels more reassuring and it is a lot more fun. So we do these

presentations together.

One of the biggest challenges in the book is the voice. As a genre, this

book is a second-generation memoir. But the voice in a memoir cannot be

we, so we had to solve that problem. We did it by writing different

chapters in different first-person voicesperhaps a bit of a challenge for

the reader, but most of the time it is really clear who is speaking.

Trajectories of Memory Intro

Documents

Transcript of Trajectories of Memory Intro