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Echoes of Silence: Writing into Reverberations of Trauma Dagmar Johanna Alexander Doctor of Philosophy – The University of Edinburgh - 2015 Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. 1 Abstract ............................................................................................................... 2 One. Accidental Beginnings: Caught by Reverberations of Trauma ................. 4 Two. Kitchen Conversations: Theorizing Trauma and its Echoes ................... 17 Three. Dear Departed: Knowing (about) Trauma ............................................ 78 Four. Monday: Trauma, Silence, Words ....................................................... 107 Five. Ghost Talk: Writing Reverberations of Trauma ................................... 130 Imaginations and Memories .......................................................................... 130 In the Beginning, or Ghost Talk No.1 ............................................................. 134 Mother and Father, or Ghost Talk No.2 ......................................................... 138 … and Children, or Ghost Talk No.3 ............................................................... 142 Resurrection, or Ghost Talk No 4 ................................................................... 146 Tales Untold, or Ghost Talk No.5 ................................................................... 164 Six. And Then: Untellings, or Echoes of Echoes ............................................. 180 References ....................................................................................................... 195 Echoes of Silence: Writing into Reverberations of Trauma Acknowledgements It seems that these writings flew out of a condensed miasma into a space where words were allowed to billow and to find a response. For that I shall always be grateful. I want to thank The Rochester Club, in particular Liz Taylor; your gentle challenges were always offered with great kindness and humour. Kate Craik, my bestest Scottish buddy, and Monika Vest, Wir zwei, nicht wahr ? Roger Bacon, for your presence and love. You taught me to speak. Judith Fewell and Liz Bondi, for your wise guidance. I simply could not have done this work without you. Akira, Anais and Katarina, my gorgeous, complex, infuriating and loveable children. What a privilege. In memoriam Hannelore and Hans Scholkemper Dagmar Johanna Alexander, January 2015 1 Echoes of Silence: Writing into Reverberations of Trauma Abstract This thesis argues for performative ways to write trauma, ghosts and silence against the particularities of German post-war experiences. It begins with the re-discovery of a photographic image that provides a starting point. I unfold linguistically uncalibrated yet embodied knowledge into insecure or uncertain registers of traumatic intergenerational reverberations. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory of trauma, I chart a trajectory from individuated self towards one pledged on intersubjective conditions for an iteratively-emergent subjectivity. Trauma framed in terms of interrelational silence is woven into the material fixicity of the image, with its fleetingly evoked and fragmented slivers of memory. Positioned on the cusp of an inquiry that troubles the coherence of a subject-who-knows, I argue for an eruptive heterogeneity that speaks creatively to possible ways of re-presenting the significance and specificity of familial and national silence in the aftermath of an abject war. The discreetness of trauma, ghosts and silence is reconfigured in terms of an in-betweenness of generational reverberations; these echoes form the layers into and against which I write silenced, repressed and marginalized voices, voices shaped predominately by absence from dominant discourses. The transgressive nature of writing against the grain, of writing against the primacy of certainty is developed further through the chapters, mapping a complex methodological and theoretical possibility. I trouble notions of ‘data’ in light of contestations that favour ambiguous possibilities pertaining to hauntings and ghosts, aware of the paradoxical nature of linearly constructed arguments in support of fragmentary and fragmented knowledge claims. The complexities are further accentuated through texts written in different genres, 2 Echoes of Silence: Writing into Reverberations of Trauma which seek to mirror context and emergent content. The thesis builds into an enmeshment of reverberations within which space is given over to Other, drawing fictitious and fictionalized voices into contestations around narrativization and finitude. Keywords : Trauma, Silence, Ghosts, Psychoanalysis, Generational Reverberations, Performative Writing, Intersubjectivity 3 Echoes of Silence: Writing into Reverberations of Trauma Language is how ghosts enter the world. They twist into awkward positions to squeeze through the black spaces. The dead read backwards, as in a mirror. They gather in the white field and look up, waiting for someone to write their names. Anne Michaels, What the Light Teaches One. Accidental Beginnings: Caught by Reverberations of Trauma When I took hold of my parents’ things after my father died a few years ago, I found, amongst the detritus of lives lived, a framed photograph of a little girl holding a doll. It was a black and white print, slightly faded around the margins, behind glass the surface of which held on to fingerprints. If I recall correctly, the photograph was taken in the small studio of our local photographer, whose name I cannot remember. I laid the print aside, and continued with unpacking. What I was searching for I cannot really say with 4 Echoes of Silence: Writing into Reverberations of Trauma any certainty. Over the coming months, the little photo would often slide into view; it kept emerging in odd places, almost as if it had wandered there on its own accord. Many days later, while folding laundry into neat piles, my thoughts were interrupted once again by the photo. Eyes and mouth begged me to look and I began to feel shy about my gaze. I felt drawn into the moment, and all I took in was this girl, maybe five years old, dressed in a warm coat, with a small scarf tied in a lose knot under her delicate chin. Lips tightly pressed into themselves, holding back any sounds, seemingly convinced of their utter uselessness. Eyelids slightly slackened, held open more out of convention, she looks up out of the frame into a beyond behind the camera, dark eyes closed off to whatever she sees, devoid of curiosity. A finite image, taken as memento before an exodus, or so it seems. I barely remember being taken to the photographer, cannot recall if I was being asked to remove my coat, to turn round and to smile at the camera. I am not sure if I remember folding my hands around the plastic hands of my doll, holding her as one would take hold of another. I seem to recall the leaden grey darkness of a room that encircled me, cut through by the sharp brightness of a singular light. I seem to remember acrid smells. I seem to remember someone standing in the corner watching me, watching over me, but I have no recollection who that might have been. I acknowledge the girl in the photo as me, and I guess, but don’t really know, that a disjuncture of this kind is somehow meaningful. I remember more. 5 Echoes of Silence: Writing into Reverberations of Trauma I remember an excursion in my wicker pushchair, my mother pushing me past the brewery on our way to her mother, my grandmother. I remember lying in my cot, next to my parent’s bed, slipping my finger into the joints where wallpaper meets wallpaper, and creating little crevices in the plaster. I remember the sun shone brightly that day. I remember I was happy. I remember the night the distillery behind our house burnt down. I remember my mother waking me to show me the raging flames and me screaming because I did not want to see. I remember the next days and weeks, unable to look out of the bedroom window because I would see burnt and devastated buildings. I remember liking to be taken to the shoe shop, not because I wanted to have a new pair of shoes, but because I liked the machine which would x-ray my feet and I could see right into my bones. I remember the many nights my parents went out and left me alone. I remember getting up to dial the telephone number of their friends to check if they had arrived safely. I remember I would not go to sleep otherwise. I remember the time I asked my mum for an empty cigarette packet and collected little caterpillars from the bushes in the yard. I remember that she asked me to release them back outside as soon as