Entangled memories - reconciliation of Eastern and Western Europe in contemporary Jewish writings.

TY - CONF

T1 - Entangled memories - reconciliation of Eastern and Western Europe in contemporary Jewish writings.

AU - Ortner, Jessica

PY - 2015/6/17

Y1 - 2015/6/17

N2 - This paper investigates the current tendency in contemporary Jewish literature to intertwine the history of the Holocaust with the history of Communism. Especially writers with a background in exile or diaspora often shape “multidirectional” connections between the Holocaust and Europe’s other traumatic histories (Rothberg, 2009). Thus, they manage to reconcile the Europe’s two core memories, Holocaust and Communism, which, according to Aleida Assmann, still are in a state of mutual competition (2013: 154-165). E.g. the German Jewish writer Barbara Honigmann situates several of her novels in the context of the two dictatorships which in quick exchange came about Eastern Germany (2000, 2004). Similarly, Vladimir Vertlib in Das besondere Gedächnis der Rosa Masur (2001) gives voice to the fictional figure of a Jewish woman who both has suffered under the anti-Semitism of Stalinism and Nazism. In comparing the Nazi Genocide with earlier pogroms and similar atrocities around the Globe, both writers deprive the Holocaust of its singularity and incomparability. However, the importance of the Holocaust is not negated; rather the Holocaust is productively embedded in a more differentiated history of the Jews in general and the European history of the 20th century in particular. Additionally, Honigmann and Vertlib achieve to overcome the sole focus on the traumatic events and instead to present a model for a cultural memory of Europe that incorporates multiple perspectives on victimization and perpetration in the 20th century. Intertwining fact and fiction to autofictional writings, Honigmann and Vertlib stage particular family histories as the venue of big historical conflicts, thus establishing the character’s present identity as German Jews on the ruins of a devastating past.

AB - This paper investigates the current tendency in contemporary Jewish literature to intertwine the history of the Holocaust with the history of Communism. Especially writers with a background in exile or diaspora often shape “multidirectional” connections between the Holocaust and Europe’s other traumatic histories (Rothberg, 2009). Thus, they manage to reconcile the Europe’s two core memories, Holocaust and Communism, which, according to Aleida Assmann, still are in a state of mutual competition (2013: 154-165). E.g. the German Jewish writer Barbara Honigmann situates several of her novels in the context of the two dictatorships which in quick exchange came about Eastern Germany (2000, 2004). Similarly, Vladimir Vertlib in Das besondere Gedächnis der Rosa Masur (2001) gives voice to the fictional figure of a Jewish woman who both has suffered under the anti-Semitism of Stalinism and Nazism. In comparing the Nazi Genocide with earlier pogroms and similar atrocities around the Globe, both writers deprive the Holocaust of its singularity and incomparability. However, the importance of the Holocaust is not negated; rather the Holocaust is productively embedded in a more differentiated history of the Jews in general and the European history of the 20th century in particular. Additionally, Honigmann and Vertlib achieve to overcome the sole focus on the traumatic events and instead to present a model for a cultural memory of Europe that incorporates multiple perspectives on victimization and perpetration in the 20th century. Intertwining fact and fiction to autofictional writings, Honigmann and Vertlib stage particular family histories as the venue of big historical conflicts, thus establishing the character’s present identity as German Jews on the ruins of a devastating past.

M3 - Paper

ER -