1 Introduction: Theorising Europe and Recollection

Notes 1 Introduction: Theorising Europe and Recollection 1. I am indebted to an anonymous reader for providing a succinct account of this book’s aims in an anonymous reader’s report for Palgrave Macmillan; some of these observations have inflected this paragraph. 2. Independently of a query concerning the relation of memory and history in recent scholarship focusing on the twentieth century, a number of studies have attempted to place the idea of memory in historical perspective during premodern periods. Frances A. Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966) traces transformations in ars memoria – the rhetorical art of memorising through spatial images – from Roman times through the Renaissance, where the art of memory persisted in the humanist tradition despite its decline due to the spread of the printing press. Janet Coleman’s Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (1992) offers a comprehensive history of theories of memory from antiquity through later medieval times. In The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990) and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (1998), Mary Carruthers demonstrates the persist- ence of memory training even with the spread of texts, which resulted in the highly mixed oral-literate nature of medieval cultures. Lina Bolzoni’s study, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (2001) deals with the practices related to memory in sixteenth-century culture. A number of other recent works in the field of intellectual history have attempted to grapple with the intriguing problem of the historicity of the phenomenon of memory in the West. This idea of historicity of memory has been inspired in part by Pierre Nora’s essay “Between Memory and History” (1989) which introduced the multi- volume series he directed, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (1996–98). In this vein, Patrick H. Hutton’s History as an Art of Memory (1993), Mat K. Matsuda’s The Memory of the Modern (1996), and Richard Terdiman’s Present Past: Modernity and Memory Crisis (1993) all centre on the historical transformations to which, according to the different per- spectives of their works, “memory has been subject.” Like Nora, they link this historicity of the social and cultural role of memory to the radical transformations that Western civilisation has undergone in the modern period. 3. See especially Caruth (1995; 1996); Felman and Laub (1992); and Van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weiseth (1996). Leys (2000) provides a critical assessment of this consensus position, offering a history of the concept of trauma in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and literary criticism. 269 270 Notes Also, in recent years critics have called attention to the limitations of trauma theory claiming that notions of class, race, gender, and sex have not received due attention within its boundaries. Many of them have argued for the importance of rethinking trauma theory from a postcolonial perspective and the need to address the traumas visited upon members of non-Western cultures. For this critical trend in twenty-first century trauma studies see, for instance: Huyssen (2003); Bennett and Kennedy (2003); Hodgkin and Radstone (2003); Kaplan and Wang (2004); Kaplan (2005); Bennett (2005); Ball (2007); Radstone (2007a; 2007b; 2011); Fassin and Rechtman (2009); Rothberg (2009); and Craps (2013). See also the special issues of the journals Life Writing 5.1 (2008), edited by Kate Douglas, Gillian Whitlock, and Bettina Stumm and Continuum 24.1 (2010) edited by Antonio Traverso and Mick Broderick that explore a wide range of uses and applications of trauma theory beyond the scope of the conventional theory of trauma. 4. Obviously, our access to the witnesses’ testimonies is limited by a number of languages we speak. Translation has helped to overcome this problem to some extent, but the linguistic and cultural complexity of many original texts has been lost, or seriously reduced in the process of transfer. For instance, there is an issue of languages in which these memoirs were written. For many Eastern European Jews Yiddish was the first language, and many authors wrote in Yiddish without even suspecting that after the war Yiddish would cease to be a living language spoken in Europe. If a memoir written in Yiddish were to reach the wider reading public, it would have to be translated into a modern European language. As a result, translations often displaced originals, and we can only try to guess whether there is another original behind a Polish or German memoir. There are also texts written in the author’s first language, and then translated but the translation is often marked as the original and the real original cannot be easily traced. 5. As Craps notes, scholars such as Wendy Brown (1995) and Lauren Berlant (2007) have expressed strong doubts about the political value and efficacy of focusing on traumatic suffering, offering powerful critiques of the depoliticising tendencies of hegemonic trauma discourses seen to privilege psychological recovery “over the transformation of a wounding political, social, and economic system” (2013: 28). However, I would argue along with Craps that, though “trauma research does not in and of itself lead to political transformation,” it can act as an impetus for individuals and communities to work through their histories and memories of suffering and conflict from more active positions of political agency (2013: 126). In recent years, for instance, we have seen trauma discourses combined with other cultural strategies of working through a traumatic past that empha- sise the establishment of truth and delivery of social and institutional justice, or apology, forgiveness, reconciliation, and compensation. 6. In a very different setting and evoking very different histories, Sandra Richards’ research on African-American cultural travel to slave sites in the Black Atlantic also grapples with the layered and fractured memories of Notes 271 trauma and displacement. As Richards asserts, though in their encoun- ters with the sites that memorialise the transatlantic slave trade, such as Ghana’s slave castles “diasporic visitors enact conflicting identities – emotionally distraught surrogates for enslaved ancestors, smiling tourists, quarrelsome members of a reunited African family, or disruptive critics complicit with American hegemony,” Ghana and other West African nations still exert a special pull on African-American tourists as sites that mark their ancestral beginning (2005: 63). 7. Kristeva calls this loss a maternal “Thing” rather than an object because unlike an object this lost maternal is not yet specified, or separate from the subject (1987, 262 n.7). 8. In recent years several psychoanalytic authors working within the European tradition of contemporary critical thought have addressed anew the problem of the constitution of the human subject (Kristeva, 1989; 1995; Butler, 1990; 1997a; Oliver, 2001; Laplanche, 1989; Elliot, 2004). Essential to all such recastings of subjectivity is a shift away from an Oedipal-centred to a pre-Oedipal perspective, from a Lacanian-inspired theory of the linguistification of the subject to a post-Lacanian theory of pre-verbal, imaginary signification. Often taking their cue from Freud’s classic essay, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), these theories have typ- ically concerned themselves with the boundaries of the ego and with the processes of identification that constitute the ego’s economy. Moreover, these far-reaching investigations have raised afresh the question of human creation, the question of representation and fantasy, and the question of the imaginary constitution of the socio-symbolic world. For more tradi- tional intellectual histories that focus on the figure of melancholia, see: Babb (1951); Jackson (1986); Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl (1964); and Wittkower (1963). For an assessment of the similarities and differences between the melancholic states of past eras and today’s depression, see Radden (2003). On the gendered distinction between melancholia and depression see Radden (1987), and Schiesari (1992). 2 History, Memory, and Trauma in Heiner Müller’s Theatre 1. Hannah Arendt’s insight into the connections between oversees imperial- ism and Nazism has recently given rise to a more detailed literature track- ing possible links between colonial genocide and the Holocaust. While postcolonial authors such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and W. E. B Du Bois drew parallels between extermination of indigenous populations in Africa and the war of annihilation against the Jews of Europe, they did not give this problem as much attention as Arendt did in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951a). (The Burden of Our Time [London: 1951] is the title of the first British edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism.) Some claim that Arendt argued that colonial violence paved the way for National Socialism; acts of colonial genocide in German Southwest Africa 272 Notes during the early 1900s are often cited as the best proof of Arendt’s thesis (Hull, 2005; Zimmerer and Zeler, 2008; Melber, 2011). Other scholars have criticised this thesis as unduly teleological (for example, Grosse, 2005; Kundrus, 2011; Moses, 2011). See Langbehn and Salama (2001) for different viewpoints about “continuity” and “discontinuity” between colonial- ism and the genocide of Nazi Germany. See Stone (2011) for the adoption and adaptation of Arendt’s ideas in the context of genocide studies. 2. Haiti and the Haitian Revolution have been present as topoi in German literature from the early nineteenth century. The first German literary work to deal with Haiti, written in the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, is Heinrich Kleist’s The Betrothal in Santo Domingo (Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, 1811). After Kleist, the most significant literary engage- ments with the Haitian revolution in German language come from Anna Seghers (1900–83) and Müller. As a Jew and a Marxist, Seghers fled Germany in 1933, and spent most of her exile years in Latin America, including brief stays in Santo Domingo and Martinique.

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