Invasive Memory and W G Sebald’s The Emigrants (original) (raw)
Related papers
Architectures of a fragmented memory: imprisonment and liberation in W. G. Sebald's
Acta Scientiarum Language and Culture, 2015
Austerlitz (2001), written by the German author Sebald, presents a fragmented narrative with various levels of relations and symbolic plans outlined by the story of Jacques Austerlitz. This form of literary construction is in perfect harmony with the fragmentation of the past and the oblivion that shape Austerlitz. As the character’s investigations and selfdiscovery process advance, we find that he was one of the Jewish children brought to London by the Kindertransports on the eve of World War II. In this study, we investigate a kind of dividing line in Austerlitz’s story, establishing itself as an ‘in-between’ that evokes two considerably distinct moments of the narrative. These moments sometimes evoke imprisonment and relate to imprisoned memories, and sometimes evoke liberation and relate to freed memory. First, we track images and descriptions that refer to imprisonment when Austerlitz feels trapped, isolated, without past or memories. Subsequently, we map descriptions of this kind of liberation that begins when the character starts to redraw his past, in a process of self-discovery and reconstruction of his story and his identity. In this work, both Austerlitz and Sebald evoke the need to remember the traumatic past and witness it, despite all the pain and incomprehension while facing it.
Humanities, 2017
Even today, trauma theory remains indebted to Sigmund Freud's notion of belatedness: a traumatic event is not fully experienced at the time of occurrence, due to its suddenness and the lack of preparedness on the part of the human subject. In Traumatic Realism (2000), Michael Rothberg invokes the Benjaminian notion of the constellation of representation to address the shortcomings of any singular mode of trauma portrayal. Rothberg likens the realist, modernist, and postmodernist literary modes to the points of view of the survivor, the bystander, and the latecomer, respectively. I combine Rothberg's typology with insights from trauma theory to analyze Elie Wiesel's Night, Wolfgang Borchert's The Man Outside, and W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants-three texts that represent Rothberg's literary modes while at the same time problematizing genre. Dori Laub argues that distorted memory and untold stories are endemic to Holocaust representation. W.G. Sebald inscribes this distortion into his narratives, calling attention to but also repeating its effects. I argue that a perspective beginning with (but not limited to) a combined reading of these three texts yields a more complete understanding of trauma and the Holocaust than can be offered by any singular genre-even archives of documented testimonies, which, despite their necessary role, are unavoidably fraught with a problematics of memory itself.
On the Charge of Memory. Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation
Arcadia - International Journal for Literary Studies, 2011
On the Charge of Memory Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation What does a field of dogs, arranged like seagulls watching the ocean, suggest about the representation of trauma and Auschwitz? The question, posed in homage to Andrzej Munk's film Pasazerka (The Passenger, 1963), has a long answer. The answer developed here has philosophical and theoretical implications that take us deep into the structure of trauma as understood in the aesthetics of films of consequence. Munk's film provides a particularly forceful example of what representation might mean, as it links Jewish trauma to that of political resistance, yet tells this tale with consummate and poignant irony through the eyes of a Nazi who reexamines her subjective memory, and the testimony she made in bad faith. This makes the movie into a particularly complex example of Holocaust fiction; as one of the most hauntingly composed films of the twentieth century, it underscores a maxim of progressive modernist art: form embodies meaning. What does a field of dogs, arranged like gulls surveying the ocean, suggest about representations of trauma and of Auschwitz? This question, posed in homage to Andrzej Munk's film Pasazerka (Passenger, 1963) has a long answer, one that I will begin to develop here. My answer has philosophical and theoretical implications that take us deep into the structure of trauma as it is understood within the aesthetics of ambitious films. Let me underline the phrase, "representations of trauma and of Auschwitz," for in that phrase Auschwitz becomes a microcosm for both the legacy of genocide and for the unjust brutal incarceration, torture, and the murder of innocents. It also stands for the symbolic threat to the best hopes of humanity in resistance to totalitarian systems. The trauma we associate with Auschwitz includes both the trauma of survivors and the trauma of communities. As the major victim of the Holocaust, European Jewry, in all its diversity and potential solidarity responds artistically to that trauma and thereby offers other communities infinitely harmed and reduced by the Holocaust, and all those who identify with them, an impressive collective poetic testimony to the nature of trauma. Trauma in this context takes on extraordinarily large and overlapping occurrences, for the event structure of trauma must here be conceived as multifaceted. Not simply a single tragic event, the Holocaust unfolds as a nexus of arcadia Band 45 (2010) Heft 2
Representation, Expression and Identity. Interdisciplinary Insights on Multiculturalism, Conflict and Belonging. , 2009
My paper takes up a comparative view on individual identity as featured in two literary works that deal with traumatised Jewish youth in the aftermath of the Holocaust: Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. As I intend to show, the trauma of the Holocaust forces an arbitrary process of identity deconstruction upon the juvenile characters’ incompletely developed selves, which triggers in their adult lives a need for self-reconstruction, essentially experienced against thoroughly altered cultural, historical and geographical backgrounds. These characters’ initial flight for their lives and concurrent transgression of various national borders, with all the tribulations that they entail, will be regarded as complex steps towards mapping a physical trajectory of inner change. Ultimately, this survival journey will be retraced and re-mapped in old age in an attempt to reconstruct, negotiate and reconcile with an original identity. Indubitably, forceful migration engenders a break with former patterns of selfhood and generates a re-shifting of identity elements such as the cultural, ethnical, national, psychological and geographical. The prevalent prevailing ethnic factor is the lens through which these characters later perceive their rapidly changing time and space, while their interest in poetry, literary discourse and architecture expresses a need to assume and incorporate this change. Comparatively, this focus on ethnicity will be regarded against current views of plural identity affiliation and multiple membership, in an attempt to enquire into the extent to which these destinies strike an incipient balance between localism and cosmopolitanism, exclusion and inclusion, alterity and sameness. My purpose is to explore the physical and emotional distance between the deconstructed and reconstructed types of Jewishness as embodied by these fictional characters, and to stress the uniqueness of their physical and mental path back to themselves.
Masters Thesis, 2013
The flatbed truck rolled with its silent cargo towards the gas chamber. Sat in silence were a number of prisoners from the barracks of the Theresienstadt concentration camp located near the town of Terezin 1 in what is now the Czech Republic. It was here that the French Surrealist poet Robert Desnos was brought in 1944. Desnos and the other prisoners were ordered off the truck and into the gas chamber to be killed. Still no-one spoke until Desnos grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him and enthusiastically began to read her palm. He told her of good things that lay ahead, he spoke of her having grandchildren and a good life thereafter. Another person nearby offered their palm to Desnos and again he foresaw a good life with lots of happiness and success. The other prisoners in turn began to enthusiastically offer him their palms and, without exception he saw only good, even though they were only yards from certain death in the gas chamber… the SS guards became confused and visibly disoriented, unsure as to how to respond.
Studia Liturgica, 2020
Memory is not only a biological capability but also a social practice of constructing the past, which is carried out by social communities (e.g., the nation state, the family, and the church). Since the 1980s, memory studies has intertwined the concept of cultural memory with national narratives of the past that are to legitimize the connection between state, territory, and people. In the present time of growing migratory movements, memory studies has abandoned this “methodological nationalism” and turned its attention towards dynamic constructions of cultural memory. Indeed, memories cross national and cultural borderlines in various ways. The cultural memory of the Jewish people, ever since its beginning, has been defined by mobility. As the exile and forty years of wandering in the wilderness preceded the Conquest of Canaan and the building of the temple, the cultural memory of the Jewish people has always been based on the principle of extraterritoriality. The caesura of the Hol...