Unintelligible a Memoir of Unassumable Inheritance

Unintelligible A Memoir of Unassumable Inheritance with After-Words: Postmemory and Writing Perpetration, an accompanying exegesis Anna Szörényi Department of English and Creative Writing University of Adelaide October 2015 Szörényi / Unintelligible / 1 Szörényi / Unintelligible/ 2 Abstract Unintelligible: A Memoir of Unassumable Inheritance. After-Words: Postmemory and Writing Perpetration. An MA thesis in two parts. Unintelligible: A Memoir of Unassumable Inheritance is a short work that straddles the boundaries of memoir and creative non-fiction. It explores themes of intergenerational guilt and responsibility in the context of the author’s discovery of her grandfather’s role in the Hungarian Arrow Cross coup of October Fifteenth, 1944, that enabled the deportation, ghettoization and mass murder of the Budapest Jews. The intent of the memoir is not only to confess this legacy, but to meditate on its influence on the rest of the family – Captain Szörényi-Reischl’s loving wife, his son born during the war, and his granddaughter, brought up in Australia – and through their experiences to explore more generally the personal and emotional effects of trans-generational responsibility for historical atrocity, a predicament that might be called ‘perpetrator postmemory’ or ‘postguilt’. The work explores how the conflicted, partial and tentative structures of postmemory , expressed in the creative work through techniques of fragmentation, intertextuality and unreliable, multi-voiced narration, can lend themselves to the task of understanding, without condoning, the structures of genocide. The work has three aims: firstly, to bear witness to the phenomenon of an intergenerational effect of perpetration, and secondly to explore on an intimate, familial scale the structures that enabled and justified such perpetration, and the structures of denial and avoidance that kept it secret, narrowing lives in the process. The third aim is simply to tell the story of what happened; to reconstruct the family history so that it includes what was left out – the consequences of my grandfather’s actions – thus breaking the silence and putting responsibility where it belongs. These aims are echoed in the structure of the work, which begins by exploring the author’s intimate relationship with her grandmother, progresses through her efforts to find out more about her grandfather, and ends by outlining, in bare horror, the consequences of the 1944 Nazi/Arrow Cross coup of which he was, as the story has made clear by then, an enthusiastic facilitator. A final chapter meditates, from the Szörényi / Unintelligible / 3 perspective of a visit to Budapest in 2012, on Hungary’s failure to take responsibility for the Holocaust. In this way the work moves on a trajectory that begins with a child’s limited and personal perspective and moves outwards towards a broader questioning of historical responsibility. Overall, the combined creative work and exegesis explore the possibilities of ‘perpetrator postmemory’, concluding that it offers a productive method through which to explore the legacies of atrocity, navigate the literary and ethical dilemmas of representing perpetrators, and performatively enact the paradoxes of transgenerational responsibility. Szörényi / Unintelligible/ 4 Abstract .................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. 6 Part 1 (Creative Work) Unintelligible: A Memoir of Unassumable Inheritance. ......................................................................................................................... 8 Prologue ............................................................................................................... 10 Chapter One: Ghosts ......................................................................................... 12 Chapter Two: Myths .......................................................................................... 16 Chapter Three: Vera and Me .......................................................................... 22 Chapter Four: Love ............................................................................................ 34 Chapter Five: A Good Man ............................................................................... 42 Chapter Six: Abandoned friends ................................................................... 54 Chapter Seven: This is Unintelligible .......................................................... 62 Chapter Eight: No Trouble .............................................................................. 72 Chapter Nine: Trouble ..................................................................................... 80 Chapter Ten: Return Again ............................................................................. 90 Notes on sources .............................................................................................. 102 Part 2 (Exegesis) After-Words: Postmemory and Writing Perpetration ... 108 Notes to Part Two ........................................................................................ 127 References ......................................................................................................... 130 Szörényi / Unintelligible / 5 I certify that this work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in my name in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. In addition, I certify that no part of this work will, in the future, be used in a submission in my name for any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution without the prior approval of the University of Adelaide and where applicable, any partner institution responsible for the joint award of this degree. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being made available for loan and photocopying, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I also give permission for the digital version of my thesis to be made available on the web, via the University’s digital research repository, the Library Search and also through web search engines, unless permission has been granted by the University to restrict access for a period of time. Szörényi / Unintelligible/ 6 Acknowledgements Heartfelt thanks are due to Brian Castro, my supervisor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Adelaide, for his helpful and honest comments, encouragement and support for the project, and his long patience while I figured out what I was doing. Also to Amanda Nettelbeck, co-supervisor and mentor, for her great enthusiasm, equal patience and insightful feedback. Many thanks also to my family, especially my father Nick, for tolerating, supporting and even praising my efforts at ruining the family reputation, and my mother Jan, for ever-reliable proof-reading. Also to Olga Kállai for her reminiscences of my grandfather. Posthumous thanks are due to my grandmother, Vera Szörényi, for living through it all, and for writing it down in her memoir, my primary source of information about her life and about Emil. I am not at all sure that she would have enjoyed reading this work, but I hope she would have understood my aims in writing it. I hope that her many friends and former students will also understand. Further thanks go to Gyöngyi Farkas and Colonel Attila Bonhardt at the Hungarian Military Archives, for their assistance in generously finding and forwarding me Emil’s military files, and also for their detailed and thoughtful responses to my queries. Much appreciation also to Sándor Szakály, László Karsai, György Novák and Mária Novák, who together provided contact with the Archives. Translations of the files, as well as some passages from other Hungarian texts, were provided by Ágnes Szabó and Zsuzsa Rács, who both also offered much support and enthusiasm for the project. Rita Horányi also very kindly provided some brief translations of Nagy’s Végzetes Esztendők. I would like to thank colleagues and students in the Department of Gender Studies and Social Analysis, as well as staff, fellow students and former students in the Department of English and Creative Writing, both at the University of Adelaide, for expressing enthusiasm for the project and offering emotional support during the writing process. Margaret Allen, Jill Jones, Amy Matthews and Shannon Burns in particular helped me feel I was doing the right thing. Emma Carmody and Katrina Jaworski gave Szörényi / Unintelligible / 7 valuable feedback and even more valuable encouragement on early drafts and helped me believe I could do this. Katrina, Michelle Jager, Chelsea Avard and Annabel Evitts shared writing days and writing snacks at their homes and mine, and helped make it all happen. Finally, many thanks to Mark Peel, who told me what to look for in my family story, and to Ron Hoenig, whose extraordinary generosity and astute questions helped me to face it. Any errors, omissions, or misjudgements remain my own. Szörényi / Unintelligible/ 8 Part 1: Creative work Unintelligible A Memoir of Unassumable Inheritance. Szörényi / Unintelligible / 9 ‘There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or has been deformed by us. … Yesterday is not a milestone

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