Memory and Periphery, Special Issue

HAGAR
Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities

Volume 12 Winter 2014
EDITORS
Reut Reina Bendrihem

Kobi Kabalek
Mori Ram
SPECIAL ISSUE EDITOR
Kobi Kabalek
Special Issue
Memory and Periphery
HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities Vol.12 Winter 2014
2014
All Rights Reserved
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
The Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences
Layout and cover design: Sara Levy, Beer-Sheva

Printed by BGU Print Unit, Israel
CONTENTS
Reut Reine Bendrihem, Kobi Kabalek and Mori Ram

Preface
Kobi Kabalek
Memory and periphery: An introduction
Anke Pinkert
Re-viewing the margins: Peripheral memory and remnants of war in
the East German DEFA film, Carbide and Sorrel (Frank Beyer, 1963)
23
Amy Garey
Soviet reflections: Music, nostalgia and personhood among (post-)Soviet
immigrants in America
46
Julia Creet
Peripheral to the past: Memory and microhistory
Red Chidgey
Between the therapeutic and the democratic? Mediating disability
memories online
Zuzanna Dziuban
Memory as haunting
73
90
111
Reflections
Safa Aburabia
The Bedouin-Arab historical memory: Documenting the silenced
voices of the margins
Guy Beiner
Memory and periphery in Ireland
136
138
Peter Carrier
Gossip and the formation of periphery over time
Lea David
Memory construction on the European Unions peripheries:
East European and former Yugoslav countries
Ewa Domanska
Rethinking memory and periphery in the age of Anthropocene
Zhuang Wei and Astrid Erll
Notes from the periphery of globalizing memory:
The Jewish exile in Shanghai
142
144
148
150
Henry Greenspan
Treblinka and the ardent lover
152
Shmulik Lederman
Memory, periphery, center: The Nakba as a case in point
155
Daniel Levy
Centering mnemonic peripheries: From heroic victors to
deserving victims
159
Gerd Sebald
Spatializing memory
161
John Sutton
Central and peripheral perspectives in autobiographical memory
163
On the contributors
165
Preface
REUT REINE BENDRIHEM, KOBI KABALEK and MORI RAM
Out of the air a voice without a face

Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief
(The Shield of Achilles, W. H. Auden).
Since its inception, Hagar has provided a platform for scholars of different
disciplines to discuss various peripheral perspectives and phenomena. The
journal focuses its attention on the issues, viewpoints and insights that emerge
from the outside looking in, which endow scholars with unconventional vantage
points in examining and reconsidering the terms of both center and periphery.
This issue of Hagar asks what constitutes peripheral perspectives in the study
of memory and what such perspectives can add to this important research field.
We editors have strongly felt the need for peripheral, alternative perspectives
during the work on this special issue, when the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has
reached new peaks of violence. The IDFs massive bombardment of densely
populated areas in the Gaza Strip and the Hamas extensive and long-reaching
missile fire at Israeli cities have involved civilians in an unprecedented manner.
As before, many depictions of this conflict portrayed a one-sided image, which
saw the others as solely responsible for the violence. Yet this time we, as
Israelis, faced a previously unfamiliar degree of socially accepted racism and
indifference to human life, which was justified using a highly selective depiction
of former conflicts and drawing on the trauma of the Holocaust as a mythical
symbol of Jewish victimhood. Rather than follow such crude and simplistic
HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities Vol. 12 Winter 2014. 5-6
Reut Reine Bendrihem, Kobi Kabalek and Mori Ram
interpretations, the texts gathered in this issue advance a view of memory

that pays attention to the experiences of the marginalized, exposes the power
mechanisms behind hegemonic narratives concerning the past, and offers new
ways to conceive of memory.
Memory and periphery: An introduction1

KOBI KABALEK
This special issue addresses the possible connections and mutual benefits of
examining together two analytic concepts: memory and periphery. These concepts
receive much attention in various scholarly discussions, yet they have done so rather
independently from each other. The potential applications and utilities of combining
memory and periphery will hopefully become apparent in this introduction, as well
as in the contributions to this issue. But before turning to definitions and research
questions, let us first take a look at a recent film production, which illustrates a few of
the possible perspectives that connecting memory and periphery may yield.
The film in question is The Katzman Tapes (2013), a pseudo documentary (or
mockumentary) directed and written by Amnon Winner. The films website states that it
tells, with an ironic and satirical tone, but with a totally serious faade, the story
of the state of Israel and Zionism, while tracing the elusive account of Shmuel
Katzmans figure and its undocumented influence on the processes of history
(http://thekatzmantapes.wix.com/katzman, accessed November 2014).
Although Katzman is a fictional character (a kind of Israeli Forrest Gump), The

Katzman Tapes places him at the center of historical events and raises a variety of
very real concerns regarding the state of Zionist ideology and its role in shaping Israeli
society. The film does so in a series of interviews with various experts and public
figures and portrays the directors journeys to different places around the globe in
order to follow the story of this lost father figure.
If we consider this film in relation to questions of memory,2 we could point to
at least four different aspects of peripheriality. First, in portraying a fictional
character as a central actor behind the scenes of Israeli history, the film can be
said to shift and redefine the terms of this history. It thus offers alternatives to
Zionist narratives of the States past, exposes it to criticism and presents some of
its ridiculous facets from unexpected angles. Second, while The Katzman Tapes
focuses on the State of Israel, the directors point of view constantly takes the
Kobi Kabalek
viewers to other countries and continents to reflect on Israels past and present. The
places chosen (e.g., a small Japanese town, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, New
York) and the pictures the director takes there stretch and challenge the familiar
topography of Zionist narratives. This becomes most obvious when the director/
narrator asks what should be the first station in Katzmans story and explicitly
rejects starting in Degania (the first kibbutz), where allegedly all Zionist narratives
begin. He chooses instead his protagonists Polish hometown, but as a substitute
to visiting Poland, the director imagines it through pictures of Japanese woods,
thus positioning the conventional movement from the Ashkenazi diaspora to the
land of Israel within an unusual transnational perspective. The third peripheral
aspect refers to violence, an integral part of the Israeli reality, which in the film
appears only on the margins of the plot. In the first half of The Katzman Tapes, we
encounter a disconnection between the topics expressed in the figures dialogues
(discussing history, but also everyday concerns) and the cameras short glances at
the headlines of newspapers that report the death of Israelis in terror attacks. By
incorporating these headlines, the director adds, without really diverting from his
search for Katzman, a sense of the existential fear of Jews, which is complemented
by his recurring references to European antisemitism. Finally, the film omits any
reference to Palestinians, thus endorsing their social marginalization and erasure
from Israels history (Piterberg, 2010). By not incorporating any Palestinian voices
and experiences, the film adopts the Zionist story of brave Jewish pioneers who
came to redeem an empty land and who themselves were victims of violence for
which they were not to be blamed.3
The Katzman Tapes thus presents a few ways through which peripheral views
can challenge, enrich, divert, stretch, reevaluate, support and ignore narratives that
address and shape memory. By considering the relevance of periphery (however
defined and used) to the study of memory, this special issue hopes to add a fresh
interpretative and methodological framework to the field of memory studies. It
wishes to do so by making explicit the memoryperiphery link in existing scholarship
and offering new directions for exploring the insights entailed in this link in pieces
written specifically for this purpose. The questions that guide us throughout this
special issue are: What is the role of peripheral perspectives in a research field that
seems to still focus on the alleged center of society and on collective, cultural or
social memory as representing the elusive notion of a majority? Which aspects
or objects of remembering can be considered peripheral? What constitutes their
peripheriality? What are the functions of seemingly marginal elements in the
exchanges that characterize and constitute mnemonic practices and products? Does
it make sense to speak about remembrance/memory in spatial terms, and are there
any alternatives to such conceptualizations?
The special issue is divided into three parts. The introduction will sketch the terms
of our discussion and point to various possible directions in examining the memory
of periphery and the periphery of memory. The five articles that follow go in depth
into diverse specific constellations of the topic from different disciplines. The final
part presents eleven short reflections on memory and periphery by scholars who
have dealt with these concepts from a variety of standpoints. The multiplicity of
outlooks, disciplinary approaches and perceptions that the contributions to this
special issue present are inherent to the subject matter, which crosses themes,
places and periods. These differences were intentionally sought in order to trace
as many meanings and uses as possible, and they definitely cannot be considered
comprehensive. In spite of the dissimilarities, practically all of the contributions to
this special issue pursue a basic understanding of periphery as constituting a less
visible, neglected and remote factor (of various sorts) that, precisely because of
its marginality (however conceived), provides and enables an unusual perspective
that could serve to challenge and enrich preconceived analytic notions as well as
raise political and ethical issues.
Center and periphery

Let us first review common definitions and usages of periphery in relation to its
(at least implied) counterpart, center, and consider peripherys epistemic potential.
Generally speaking, the contrast of center with periphery is employed as an organizing
tool based on the relation of isolated points (center) to the surface that surrounds
them (periphery). This depiction assigns certain remoteness to two (or more) objects,
topics, places, opinions and the like that share (or are subsumed under) the same
general frame. Centers serve as focal points because they stand high in an order of
symbols, values, beliefs or power and often also due to considerations of physical
location. In its extreme form, centerperiphery assumes a contrast that is stable
enough indeed to stand for the geographic distance between two zones. It constitutes
a two-dimensional mappinga mapping without perspectival illusions, deceptions or
ambiguities (Gumbrecht, 1997:272).
Nevertheless, the dividing lines between centers and peripheries are often blurred.
Their respective locations are felt and cannot be pinpointed and articulated in a manner
that all could agree on.4 Scholars have pointed out that, even in modern societies,
where states implement centralizing measures and aspire to totality, the interplay
between center and periphery is fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies
(Lefebvre, 1991:331334). They describe the susceptibility of centers to various
degrees of movability and question their solidity and durability. Instead of clear
distinctions in a two-dimensional mapping, scholars are increasingly speaking of
9
Kobi Kabalek
in-between areas and examining encounters, connections and frictions (Tsing, 2005)
in frontiers, boundaries, borders (Diener and Hagen, 2010; Mezzadra and Neilson,
2013), edges (Casey, 2011) and alternative spaces (Megill, 2009). They turn their
attention to mobility and movement rather than settle for stable locations and static
categories (Andolph and Avrutin, 2012; Sternhell, 2012).
The centerperiphery scheme seems to serve nowadays primarily as a target for
criticism and deconstruction. The clear distinction between the two elements of this
analytical duo is relativized and used to introduce liminal and multidimensional
notions, which account for the increasing deterritorializations of people, matter,
culture, art, etc. (Ramadan, 2007:143; see also Ghosh-Schellhorn and Alexander,
2006). In its function as a scholarly punching bag, centerperiphery continues to
play an important role in questioning the use of binary categories and reconsidering
issues of social justice, power and the production of knowledge. Post-colonial
and feminist critics have especially depicted the margins as sites imbued with
transgressive capacity that could destabilize and transform the respective center by
shifting marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures [to] marginality one
chooses as a site of resistance (hooks, 1990:153). According to some variants of this
view, marginalized subjects have an epistemic advantage, a particular perspective
that scholars should consider, if not adopt, when crafting a normative vision of a just
society (Nash, 2008:3).
This view is not without its methodological traps.5 Nevertheless, the epistemic
potential of peripheral perspectives should not be doubted. Scholarly attention to
peripheries (with or without explicit reference to a clear center or core) provides
uncommon and thought-provoking insights that could help revamp existing research
interests. The examples for that are indeed telling (Chakrabarty, 2000; Diner, 2008;
Peltonen, 2001). But since centers and peripheries are not static and the terms and
objects of marginalization are case-specific and mutable, we must be able to shift
our attention accordingly rather than blindly adopt preconceived notions and
predictable academic practices. A flexible attitude that pays attention to changes and
transformations could counter stagnation and overt conventionalization and yield
innovative analytic perspectives. The remainder of this introduction examines some
of these perspectives.
Memories of the marginalized

A common approach to the memory of periphery seeks alternative and local accounts
of marginal subjects and appreciates their particular perceptions and experiences.
This approach frequently follows a democratic impulse that aims to redeem
underprivileged groups, diminish their (physical or other) distance from their
10
respective centers,6 and provide them with social recognition. Many scholars speak
accordingly of peoples right to memory (Lee and Thomas, 2012; Reading, 2014)
as an important element of social justice, due to the role memory plays in establishing
collective identities and because of the connection between contemporary inequality
and past discrimination.7
A commonly used concept that addresses the power relations implicated in
marginalized memory is silencing. The term stresses social actors active efforts to
exclude certain people and stories from collective depictions of the past. Silencing
deals with the many ways in which the production of historical narratives involves
the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal
access to the means of such production (Trouillot, 1995:xix). In order to break
the silences that constitute and support oppression and inequality,8 the subaltern is
given an opportunity to speak. Oral history is thus used to clamor against the crime
of silence (Lim, 2014:6), for instance, when interviewing witnesses to the events
that took place in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which the Chinese regime is trying to
obscure.
As three contributions to this issue (by Red Chidgey, Safa Aburabia and
Shmulik Lederman) demonstrate, however, a one-dimensional depiction
of silencer vs. silenced (or the peripherys resistance against the centers
oppression) might miss the multiple factors that participate in the marginalization
of minorities memories, the specific forms these memories assume and the
functions that they serve in the peripheries. Furthermore, since a certain degree
of forgetting is imperative for the construction of a positive sense of self,
some minorities commemorative initiatives choose not to display the more
painful parts of their past. By performing a partial self-silencing, minorities
can both advance communal identification based on optimistic values (rather
than on memories of hatred and violence) and attempt to appeal to the majority
population (Wagenhofer, 2013). In order to make political and social aspirations
relatable and publicly effective, some minorities initiatives prefer to focus on
single events, stories or persons to deliver their message, although in this way
they neglect referring to some of the groups experiences and voices (Armstrong
and Crage, 2006; Schwartz, 2009). This means that positive (empowering)
forgetting and negative (repressive) forgetting may coexist and that their
combination could become instrumental in attaining social equality or reaching
reconciliation between former foes (Barkan, 2000; Misztal, 2010). We should
also remember that silences have different meanings and causes (Greenspan,
2014) and might express particular cultural practices rather than be a product of
oppression (Kidron, 2012). Moreover, although silence is often tightly coupled
with forgetting and talk with memorysilence can also be used to facilitate
11
Kobi Kabalek
recollection, while talk can be used to enhance amnesia (Vinitzky-Seroussi and

Teeger, 2010:1104; see also Connerton, 2008). Such considerations establish the
need to address the memory of periphery as part of a complex set of factors that
go beyond a crude power struggle where the center is identified with silencing/
forgetting and periphery with remembrance.
Formation, transformation
The study of memory and periphery does not, however, apply solely to questions
of social recognition. A number of reflection pieces in this issue point out the
role of mnemonic processes in the formation and transformation of peripheries.
Peter Carrier offers a new reading of the social history of Leicester that traces
the role of memory and gossip in the creation of social peripheries as temporal
entities. In so doing, he provides a fascinating illustration of the multidirectionality
of the memoryperiphery link. Lea David discusses how the foundation of the
European Union and the collapse of the Communist regimes established a new
memory periphery in Europe. While the EU pushes for the production of shared
attitudes in terms of European memory, it has in fact led to contradictory and
competing narratives of the continents pasts, a finding that illustrates that the
post-Communist states draw on circles of meaning not limited to the European
framework.
Daniel Levy argues that the growing attention of memory scholars to peripheral
memories indicates that the marginal has moved center stage. In pointing to the
shifting positions of scholarly views concerning the memories of center and
periphery, his piece could be used to ponder on whether the centralization of
mnemonic peripheries also means the peripheralization of the respective centers.
Henry Greenspan reveals a different kind of shift regarding what comprises the
central and the marginal in interviews with a Holocaust survivor. He demonstrates
how conducting multiple interviews with the same person uncovers various and
malleable versions of ones past and varying ways of framing it, thus reminding us
we should not accept a particular narrative constellation as the sole and true one.
In other contexts, scholars have observed the wandering of peripheries and
the role of memory in their altered constitution. Herman Lebovics has shown how
Frances decolonization in the 1960s caused the French government to announce
a series of steps that practically redefined the rural regions of the country as the
new colonies. In an intriguing reenactment of the anti-colonial struggle, the
government employed methods and experts from the former colonies, and the
regional resisters emulated the symbols and methods of Third World freedom
fighters (Lebovics, 2004).
12
Broader views
Additional perspectives on the memory of periphery urge scholars to widen their
gaze and not to remain fixed on the usual suspects of memory research.9 Thus a
recent collection of articles entitled Peripheral Memories defines itself as a turn away
from the prevalent preoccupations with national memory cultures and collective
experiences of violence to everyday social interactions (Boesen et al., 2012). Other
studies challenge the tendency to focus on capital cities when writing national histories
and integrate alternative memory centers into their analyses. Thus, Guy Beiners
investigation (in this volume) of peripheral memory in Ireland shows that, since
Dublin did not always constitute the main and only arena of historical occurrences,
places on the Irish periphery assumed a central significance in depictions of certain
pasts. Rather than present a single pattern of centerperiphery relations, Beiner
identifies three modes of memory through which the periphery can assert itself.
Two contributions to this issue show how expanding the view on memory and
periphery can take place on very different scales. John Sutton examines the interplay
of two perspectives in autobiographical memory: one in which a person recalls
personal experiences as if looking through her own eyes at the time, and the other in
which one occupies the standpoint of an external observer. Sutton argues that, while
scholars often privilege the former, central perspective, peripheral modes of
access to the past can also form rich and transformative parts of memory experience.
In stark contrast to this close look at memory at the individual level, Ewa Domanska
ponders how periphery and memory would be conceived as part of recent scholarly
discussions that explore human life within a geological view of Earths history, a view
that stretches and rethinks common notions of time, space and community.
The growing tendency of late to expand the perspective on memory articulates itself
primarily by placing it within global, transnational and transcultural frameworks.
Rather than simply enlarge the examined objects of study (a move that might lead
to the application of unsuitable concepts),10 these studies demonstrate the continuous
and multifaceted mobility, mediation and multidirectionality of memory (Bond and
Rapson, 2014; Levy and Sznaider, 2006; Rothberg, 2009). That is, they approach
memory as a form of mediated action, which is not confined to certain sites, but
rather is constituted through constant movements and interactions. Memories thus
emerge from multiple places and are involved in interplay between different pasts and
a heterogeneous present. Furthermore, the
focus on worldwide mnemonic processesinvites the question of how, from
non-Western perspectives, we might challenge and consider our categories,
provincialize cultural memory,11 as it were, and conceive of memory in its
multiplicity and discrepancy (Erll, 2011:16).
13
Kobi Kabalek
Astrid Erlls and Zhuang Weis reflection piece traces these questions in relation
to the memory of the Jewish exile in Shanghai during the Holocaust. In observing
the double peripheriality of this topic (both regarding its geographic location and its
absence in common accounts of the Holocaust) and its rising centrality and mobility
in recent years, they help foster a discussion on the possible meanings and features of
periphery in relation to globalizing memory.
Looking at diasporas and from diasporas constitutes important contemporary ways
of reconsidering and provincializing common approaches to memory and identity,
which are still largely associated with the nation-state. Recent studies point to the
important role of diasporic communities in the emergence of nationalism (ODonnell,
Bridenthal and Reagin, 2005) and some have even suggested that nowadays, due to
the increasing numbers of immigrants and the pressures of global media, whole
nations are becoming diasporic in relation to their past (Huyssen, 2003:151). When
a diaspora and its nation-state seem to spill into each other, this raises queries
regarding the boundaries of memory and the possible centers it has (Wulf, 2009).
In her article in this issue, Amy Garey tackles a particularly complex case when
exploring nostalgia in festivals of Soviet-era songs that take place in the United States.
Garey asks whose memories are being performed there and what kind of communal
sentiments are expressed on this periphery of the Soviet imagined community, which
no longer has a center. In this sense, she writes, people go to these campouts, at least
in part, in search of a Soviet phantom.
Pilgrimage to the past

Peripheries must not necessarily constitute places of resistance, competition,
divergence and ambiguity in relation to the memory produced by national centers.
In various ways, peripheral locations actually contribute to the formation of political
centers and their versions of the past. While the proximity of people to monuments
and memorials plays an important role in making present certain versions of memory,
travelling to distant places of higher value and meaning could endow people with a
different commemorative gain. This can be seen, for instance, in the longstanding
ritual significance that Israeli Zionists assigned to climbing the ancient fortress
Masada, above the Dead Sea, in order to celebrate it as a symbol of Jewish strength.
The anchoring of this event in an exciting geographical location opened the
opportunity to add alternative means of relating to the historical event, combining a
patriotic lesson with an adventure (Zerubavel, 1995:120). We find similar, yet less
adventurous, trips to sites of mass death in the case of the annual ceremonies that the
East German government held at the Buchenwald memorial. In these ceremonies,
state officials styled themselves as continuing the legacy of the anti-fascist resistance
14
and then carried their heroic aura with them back to the political center in Berlin
(Knigge, 1998). Scholars have often conceived of these journeys to historical sites of
violence (Mosse, 1990) or to graves of national leaders (Feige and Ohana, 2012) as
modern pilgrimages. A number of memory scholars employ Victor Turners depiction
of pilgrims as people who leave their home and embark on a journey to a sacred
periphery, which transiently becomes a sacred center. The individual thereby potentially
experiences a feeling of social bond (communitas) and returns home transformed. In
some cases, these pilgrimages are individuals returns to places they used to live in, as
in the case of Palestinian refugees visiting (on their own or with family) the village or
city they had to leave (Abu-Lughod, 2007; Ben-Zeev, 2011:103109). In other cases,
these are trips organized by public bodies with a pedagogical agenda that advances a
specific interpretation of the past (Feldman, 2008).
The notion of traveling outside of the familiar and everyday in order to somehow
gain access to the past could also be applied to a number of activities associated
with remembering. This takes place on a most basic level in historical tourism, where
visitors take the experience with them through various souvenirs, stories and pictures
or give something of their own, leaving a trace that connects them to the historical
place (Sather-Wagstaff, 2011). Similarly, historical reenactments and interactive
exhibitions in museums (such as The Trench at the Imperial War Museum, London)
offer people a way to participate in events they have missed (Amster, 2007).
Peoples efforts to experience what they did not go through themselves appear in
Gary Weissmans study of non-witnesses who attempt to capture the horror of the
Holocaust by reading survivors accounts and visiting authentic sites of the genocide
(Weissman, 2004). Other studies portray how the children of victims of mass violence
remember instances of their parents experiences (Chaitin and Steinberg, 2014) and
how personal memories integrate images and episodes taken from a variety of media
(Hirsch, 2001; Landsberg, 2004; Roseman, 1998).
The notion of going outside oneself in constructing ones memory can also be
used to inquire as to what belongs to the self and what the self belongs to. In her
article in this volume, Julia Creet contemplates what it means to be peripheral to the
past. She does so in relation to her recent discovery of the Holocaust experiences of
her late mother, who had told her daughter neither what she went through nor about
her Jewishness. How does one remember something that was latently but manifestly
not ones own?
Memory at the margins

This final section considers references to the past that appear at the margins of
various depictions or are otherwise characterized by a limited visibility. The issue
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of relative or absolute invisibility is regularly raised in approaching questions of

social marginalization (Brighenti, 2010:4647) and as part of attempts to give people
whose experiences went thus far unnoticed an equal and visible place in society
(Beltrn, 2009; Moore, 2011). When applied to a discussion of memory, invisibility
corresponds with silencing a certain groups experiences within hegemonic narratives.
Yet this invisibility is often not complete. By examining peripheral details that
appear in depictions from varied media, we sometimes discover that they act as
hints that invite us to reflect on alternative, and even subversive, memories that
may break these very silences.
The articles by Anke Pinkert and Zuzanna Dziuban in this volume offer two
different illustrations of this point. Pinkert presents a close analysis of an East
German film (Carbide and Sorrel, 1963), which describes one mans journey in
the aftermath of WWII and exposes, on the way, a number of images concerning
the war and the immediate postwar period. She points to the existence of traces
of certain aspects of that past, which the East German regime silenced in official
accounts, on the margins of the films visual field. While these aspects are constantly
alluded to, they
have marginal impactif at allon the story. On the other hand, this meandering,
accidental narration allows the reintroduction of topics that have become semitaboo in the national memory discourse of the postwar period, including most
notably the trope of sexual violence.
Pinkert stresses that these barely noticeable, fleeting moments in the film become
meaningful only when the viewer decides to focus on them and accept them as
enticements for the acknowledgment of unpopular themes regarding historical
trauma.12
Dziubans article discusses quite a different articulation of the pasts marginal
visibility, embodied in the figure of the ghost, which nevertheless presents a very
similar potential for destabilizing hegemonic narratives and offering alternatives to
them. She points to the dual application of figurative and non-figurative ghosts. On
the one hand, as transitional figures, merging the visible and invisible, the living and
the dead, ghosts refer to communities excluded from the social and political realm.
On the other hand, the figure of the ghost designates the moment of the pasts
sudden and uncanny interruption or disruption of the present and voices resistance
by addressing the problem of misrepresentations and denial inscribed in official
interpretations of the past. Dziubans case study is an analysis of representations
that report Poles being haunted by the forgotten Jewish residents of the Muranw
district in Warsaw, the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, and how these ghosts introduce
critical standpoints to debates on Polish-Jewish history.
16
A final word
The variety of studies and viewpoints surveyed in this introduction testify to the
heuristic potential of combining memory and periphery. I have shown, on the
one hand, the transgressive capacity of peripheral perspectives to blur boundaries,
break silences, destabilize centers and question common analytic categories in the
study of memory. On the other hand, I have discussed some aspects of peripherality
that contributed to the creation and validation of centers and their versions of the past.
As Gerd Sebald notes in his reflection piece, the combination of the temporal term
memory with the spatial term periphery appears rather odd at first glance. Indeed,
several scholars have recently criticized the still prevalent tendency to approach
memory in starkly spatial terms, which often culminates in treating memory as a
thing or a container (Erll, 2011; Kabalek, Forthcoming; Middleton and Brown,
2005; Olick, 2007:85118). Yet as Sebald shows, and the contributions to this special
issue illustrate, the spatialization of memory through peripheral perspectives can do
something else. It can introduce new and unusual ways of viewing our relationship to
the past, raise questions regarding the forms and functions of centers, and contemplate
the unit of memory itself and its possible margins.
NOTES
1
I would like to thank Reut Bendrihem, Zuzanna Dziuban, Mori Ram and Or Tshuva
for their helpful comments on this text.
The film itself is not memory as such, but rather a product of mnemonic processes,
while also offering certain perspectives for the discussion of specific pasts. On this
point, see Radstone (2005).
The films focus on Israelis/Jews as victims might also be a response to the recent
tendency in several Israeli documentaries to discuss Israelis as perpetrators. See
Morag (2013).
It is the center, because it is the ultimate and irreducible; and it is felt to be such by
many who cannot give explicit articulation to its centrality (Shils, 1982:93).
The attempt to endorse peripheral and indigenous knowledge might lead scholars
to reify difference, pursuing authentic and untouched cultural specificity while
failing to account for knowledge that travels and mobilizes (Tsing, 2005:8; see
also Huggan, 2001).
The question of whether to maintain a marginal position or to demand inclusion in
17
Kobi Kabalek
the mainstream is itself a matter of discussion among marginalized groups. See, for
instance, Sturken (1997:184185).
7
The significance of memory to the latter aspect is that it highlights the subjective side
of a history of discrimination, the meaning the past has for members of those groups
who were the targets of discrimination and oppression (Williams, 1998:463464).
Nur Masalha (2012) speaks in this sense about memorycide of the Nakba.
Sidra Ezrahi (1996) thus argues that, by looking for the peripheral places of
the Holocaust, i.e., not focusing on Auschwitz (which many scholars depict as
the center or black hole that pulls all Holocaust references to it), one could
reconstruct alternative histories of this event.
10
Nancy Fraser has warned against recklessly transferring the discussion of the
public sphere, a notion that was conceived for the national context, to transnational
frameworks (2009:7699).
11
This is a reference to Chakrabarty (2000).
12
One should not, of course, assume that all cases of incorporating traces of silenced
narratives on the margins aim at producing alternative depictions of the past. Danielle
Schwartzs recent analysis of the Israeli film Paratroopers (dir. Judd Neeman, 1977)
shows that the ruins of Palestinian buildings, which constitute the background or
setting of the occurrences (but are never addressed explicitly), contribute to erasing
the Palestinian experience and incorporate it into Zionist narratives (Schwartz, 2014).
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22
Re-viewing the margins: Peripheral memory and

remnants of war in the East German DEFA film,
Carbide and Sorrel (Frank Beyer, 1963)
ANKE PINKERT
ABSTRACT
Based on a close reading of Frank Beyers Carbide and Sorrel (1963), this essay
explores cinematic peripheries as sites where the cultural memory of the Second
World War and its immediate aftermath was negotiated in East German DEFA
films of the 1960s. Rather than construing the sonic, narrative and visual margins as
incessantly haunted by traumatic losses related to the war, Beyers film foregrounds the
spectators participatory engagement in the production of memory. As the film draws
the viewers attention to residues of catastrophic experiences in the limits of cinematic
space, the periphery also enables an affective and perceptual reframing of the past that
underscores the reparative and life-affirming force of selective remembering, if not
forgetting.
Introduction
Carbide and Sorrel is the first in a series of DEFA films produced in the 1960s
that returned to the historical moment of real and symbolic collapse at the end of
the Second World War. Offering more plausible small-scale stories than the heroic
anti-fascist films in the previous decade were able to supply, a new generation of
directors searched for a representational language that would be capable of steering
the audience towards a more authentic sense of 1945 as a time of both catastrophe
and new beginning. Although scholars have praised these films, including Konrad
Wolfs I was 19 (1968) and Heiner Carows The Russians are Coming (1966), for
their precise social observations and realist techniques (Byg, 1999:34), the increasing
Anke Pinkert
historical distance from the war generated a new retrospective paradigm (Assmann,
1999; Weigel, 2002) which tells us more about the present of the German Democratic
Republic (hereafter GDR) present than the early postwar past. The deliberate shift
into a more explicit mode of retrospective temporality, noticed also by reviewers at
the time as Rckerinnerung (-ler, 1964),1 created the space for multiple historical
imaginaries of 1945 that both formed and were shaped by a more heterogeneous
memory culture, which emerged after the building of the Berlin Wall during a brief
period of political thaw.
Even if DEFA films about the fascist era and the immediate postwar years were
always part of larger ideological efforts to mold the past from a present perspective,
only the new war films of the 1960s, starting with Gerhard Kleins Gleiwitz Case
(1961), exposed this presentist approach to recent German history by drawing attention
to the self-conscious dimension of cinematic representations. This kind of narrative
and visual self-reflexivity concerned with filmic mediation has always been perceived
as the trademark of the critical New German cinema that emerged in West Germany
during the late 1960s and 1970s. However, the new anti-fascist productions in the
GDR already provide powerful cinematic models that begin to address the imaginary
and discursive role played by film in creating a collective historical memory. As I have
discussed elsewhere in more detail (Pinkert, 2008), this turn to greater contingency
allowed the new wave of East German anti-fascist films to explore more open-ended
practices of post-melancholic mourning that undermined the self-mythologizing of the
state. In contrast to the GDRs central memory of anti-fascist resistance, manifested
in the monument park at the former concentration camp Buchenwald built in 1958,
the war films of the 1960s reduce the propensity of the master narrative to fix the
fascist past in a particular heroic image. Favoring a dramaturgy that is aware of the
viewers participation in the production of a historical imaginary, the films by Frank
Beyer, Konrad Wolf and Heiner Carow engage more tenuous and fragmentary visions
of the collapse of the Third Reich and its aftermath.
More deliberately than any of the early DEFA films of the 1940s and 1950s, this
provisional approach to 1945 as an incongruous moment of defeatvictory
(Schivelbusch, 2003) harnesses the mnemonic capacities of fleeting moments to render
the residues of historical trauma in the margins of the visual field. These traces tend to
be associated with the physical destruction and mass death experienced by the Germans
themselves, even ifalbeit to a lesser extentDEFA films, including Beyers own
Jacob the Liar (1974), also addressed anti-Semitic persecution and the vanishing of the
Jews in the Holocaust (Pinkert, 2012). Whenever the films of the 1960s represent the
postwar German subject through a discourse of survival, they ameliorate the official
notion of anti-fascist victory that DEFA films generally privileged. This softened
approach should not be mistaken for the nostalgic revisionism that characterized West
24
Re-viewing the margins
German movies of the 1950s. Even as the new DEFA films reimagine 1945 as
moment of historical rupture, they sustain, if to varying degrees, an identification
with the anti-fascist teleology favored by the GDRs cultural politics. Yet, instead
of creating a totalizing narrative that spans from heroic Communist resistance to the
liberation of Germans by Soviet troops, the postwar films of the 1960s cast the collapse
of Nazi Germany through the perspective of what remains? Notably, this offers a
double take on German war loss. One version directly illustrates the fractured psychic
and social landscape of the 1940s through more relatable characters in order to elicit
the interest, if not sympathies of a contemporary, presumably younger audience in the
1960s. Konrad Wolfs semi-autobiographical film I was 19, for example, chronicles
the journey of an inexperienced German Red Army officer who enters defeated Nazi
Germany with the Russian troops. The other version unconsciously renders, or, in
some cases, exposes and reanimates the mnemonic gaps concerning the experiences
of war loss, defeat and depression in the periphery of DEFAs collective memory
production.
Embedding these elisions within the marginal spaces of a cinematic comedy, Frank
Beyers Carbide and Sorrel incites the spectator to perform the reparative work that
shifts between remembering and future-oriented forgetting. The film moves beyond
a post-traumatic cinema where the specters of past losses linger in the liminal (sonic,
narrative, visual) spaces of the representational realm. Rather than being passively
exposed to the presumably inexorable impact of unsignifiable losses located on the
cusp between transparency and occlusion (a moving upward from past to present
that the film and the audience presumably share), Beyers film puts pressure on the
cinematic periphery as a more distinctly spatial and synchronic site where the past can
be reordered in the present through an active practice of recognition. As Silverman
reminds us, we do not ever look once and for all:
Although we cannot control what happens to a perception before we become
aware of it, we can retroactively revise the value which it assumes for us on
a conscious level. We can look at an object a second time through different
representational parameters and painstakingly reverse the process [through which
we have attributed meaning] (1996:4).
Notably, such a re-viewing itself takes place in time; it can only have a limited
efficacy, and must be repeated with each new visual perception that emerges in the
constantly shifting margins of unconscious and politically regulated representations
of the past (Silverman, 1996:4), in the Grenzgebiet des Erlaubtenthe border zone of
the permissible, as Beyer put it (2001:121).
At least to a certain extent, then, this participatory approach to the production of
cultural memory, arising in the epistemological and perceptual limits of cinematic
25
Anke Pinkert
space, reintroduces the possibility for spectatorial agency.2 As reviewers of Beyers

film put it (with a nod towards both the states regulation of cultural output and the
audiences own experience of dislocation and hardship in 1945), The filmgoing
public has decided. Choices can be made (variably on the part of the actor, director or
film, but also the spectator or critic) about what is remembered and what is forgotten
in the aftermath of the grosse Sterben, as a newspaper review of Carbide and Sorrel
in Potsdam called it (Hofmann, 1963), or what alternatively will reside, settle and
sediment as a peripheral memory that is neither normative nor incessantly haunting.
Symptoms of genuine comedy (Mrkische Volksstimme)

From the outset, by choosing the genre of comedy and, more specifically, the softer
and more light-hearted form of the Lustspiel for a cinematic return to 1945, Frank
Beyer and the screen-writer Hans Oliva challenged the GDRs monumentalizing
engagement with the anti-fascist past, while also tempering the historical hardships
Germans had experienced through a retrospective, humorous tone. In his memoir,
Beyer (19322006) recalls that he had been instantly intrigued by Olivas comedic
script for a road movie set in the last days of World War II, as it was a hybrid, a
marginal genre DEFA had never done before (2001:120). The film tells the story of
the worker Karl Blcher, a non-smoker and vegetarian, who sets off from Dresden
immediately after the war in search of supplies to rebuild a cigarette factory.
Encountering every possible mishap, the protagonist braves a journey by road and
water, dodging dogs, mines, crafty Red Army soldiers, a conniving US Army officer
and the attention of a lustful countess, in order to return with his precious cargo. As
Feinstein points out, this circuitous, picaresque comedy subtly undermined official
accounts of the GDRs history that emphasized the Soviet Unions and the Partys
deliberate shaping of the new society (2002:178). Although an increasing number
of film productions in the 1960s indicated that it was not uncommon for DEFA to
treat serious topics within the generic conventions of popular comedy, the screening
of the first cut of Beyers film for cultural officials was reportedly met with dead
silence (Beyer, 2001:123). For the most part, the unspoken anxiety among cultural
officials resulted from the films conscious de-idealization of the Russians. In contrast
to DEFAs Soviet co-production Fnf TageFnf Nchte (Five DaysFive Nights;
Leo Arnstam, Heinz Thiel and Anatoli Golowanow, 1961), also set in Dresden right
after the end of the war, Carbide and Sorrel did not shy away from alluding to moral
corruption among the Soviet occupying forces. The response by party officials was
echoed in several local and national newspapers, where reviewers initially expressed
concern that the films humor could minimize the sacrifices made by the anti-fascists
of the first hour. In addition, some critical voices feared that the films popular genre
26
would diminish Germanys devastation in the year zero.3 However, for Beyer, it
was precisely the tonality of humor at the edge of catastrophe, as he called it, the
employment of comedic distance as a psychological response to danger, as well as a
coping mechanism and means of resistance, that fascinated him (2001:122; see also
Gilman, 2000:283, n. 14).
Once approved by the Soviets and released in December of 1963, Carbide and Sorrel
became an instant success; in only three months, one million viewers saw the film,
leaving many of the theaters without copies of the program booklets that generally
accompanied DEFA screenings (Lcke, 1964). After initial hesitations, perhaps even
fear of repercussion, a kind of liberating laughter appeared to have echoed throughout
the cinemas across East Germany, while critics in the West found that the films stilted
humor was too closely related to revisionist genre productions (I.K., 1964), including
the Heimatlustspiel, abundantly available in their own movie theaters (Ponkie, 1969).
In the East, on the other hand, even Communist officials, such as the SED party
secretary of the Film Factory Wolfen, Leni Bienin, felt compelled to express their
appreciation of the films humor during informal conversations following the public
screenings. Bienin commented that, not only because we have overcome this terrible
era, but also thanks to the relatable characters in the film, who go beyond the template
of the positive hero, we can laugh about [these early times] today (Mennerich,
1964).
Notably, this kind of affective reframing of the past, resulting in an emotional
release presumably widely shared by an audience of different ages,4 relied on the
vernacular comedy and its playful use of wit and irony as a deterritorializing, minor
form that would be able to foreclose the totalizing effects of a hegemonic narrative.
With a temporal distance of almost two decades, many viewers of the film still had
recourse to the past in order to remember the immediate postwar years as lived
experience. While the reviewers of the film strike a more somber tone, centering their
own recollections on experiences of physical and mental hardship, the actor Erwin
Geschonneck, who plays Blcher, recalled that even under the worst conditions of
devastation, people persistently told jokes (Beyer, 2001:121). Be that as it may, by
the early 1960s enough time had passed for a new postwar generation to evolve that
would be susceptible to an ongoing mediation, if not transformation, of Germanys
history of destruction and defeat through a more anecdotal, even comic access to the
past. Carbide and Sorrel neither delves into the realistic authenticity deployed by
Konrad Wolf in his autobiographical film, I was 19, also set at the end of the war,
nor does Beyers film rely on the socialist realist idealization of the anti-fascist hero,
exemplified by Maetzigs biopic on the Communist leader Thlmann in the 1950s.
Instead, oriented towards the marginal, Beyer uses the mid-level genre of the Lustspiel,
situated in between the documentary record and ideological myth, in order to focus
27
Anke Pinkert
on the adventures of a modern Simplicissimus and his accidental encounters on the

road (Funke, 1964; -ler, 1964). Already in the rubble films of the 1940s (Berliner
Ballade [Berlin Ballad], Robert A. Stemmle, 1948), followed by movie productions
in West Germany (Wir Wunderkinder [Arent we Wonderful?], Kurt Hoffmann, 1958),
filmmakers had deployed elements of comedy, cabaret, satire and irony in order to
convert a historical experience imbued with suffering and pain into more livable
narratives on the screen. Walking a fine line between building on the popular appeal
of genre movies in the Third Reich and a more productive, critical reorganization of
these conventions, in the tradition of Brecht, films such as these provided an important
trajectory for Beyers efforts to both address and transform postwar memory (and its
various cinematic mediations) of the early transition period.
Specifically, the elements of the road movie, building on a longer tradition of traveling
Schwejk figures in Brechts plays, allowed for greater attention to borders and margins.
Following the conventions of the genre, also deployed at the time in other DEFA
films, such as Gerhard Kleins Sonntagsfahrer (Sunday Driver; 1963) and Hermann
Zschoches Weite Strassen (Wide Roads; 1969), the means of transportation in Carbide
and Sorrel continue to fail or fall through, leading the traveler to perpetually search
for new opportunities to move forward precisely because the limits of an unhindered
mobility can never be quite forgotten. As in other DEFA road movies, those sub-tales
of intermittent failure can only be transcended through comedy and slapstick humor
(Bttcher, 2013:338). Focused on the travails of a wandering anti-hero, Beyer creates
an episodic, heterogeneous narrative structure of vignettesor, as film critics called
them in the tradition of modern theater dramaturgy, Stationen (Funke, 1964)that
undermines the homogenous linear time associated with the historical telos of antifascist mythologies favored by the State. In that sense, even on the level of genre,
the film approaches cultural memory production from the periphery, emphasizing the
small scale, the deterritorializing dimension and minor forms of the popular. Much of
the films mainstream appeal was due to the comic talent and moral capital of the actor
Erwin Geschonneck, who himself said he was drawn to Blcher because the character
was not a class-conscious worker, but someone with the right instinct or conscience to
know what needs to be done for his class and people (Hofmann, 1963).
The films life-affirming comic relief (Beyer, cited in Der Abend, 1978) enabled
a new point of view grounded in historical distance and artistic mediation (one
moviegoer called this the verfremdende Zeitabstand, i.e., estranging temporal
distance; Funke, 1964). As Freud pointed out, humor is not resigned, it is rebellious
(1990:429). Reviewers linked the success of the films optimism, to which the audience
responded favorably, to the skillful camera work of Gnter Marczinkowsky (-ler,
1964). They noted how the straight on, clear and open Blickgaze, look, view
of the camera renders the faces of the protagonist and minor figures in ways that
28
portray those characters who are pleasant without overlooking their flaws and those
with darker sides as relatable and realistic. These commentators attest to the notion
that close attention to the human face, whose vulnerability demands our recognition
and response, can draw the spectator into the film and into the perception of another
being (Balsz, 1970:44; Levinas, 1990:9). The critics concluded that this new Blick,
oriented at kindness and sympathy, was able to shed a different light on the tragic
hardship experienced by the Germans at the end of the war (Funke, 1964).5 In their
view, contemporary spectators in East Germany of the 1960s were doing nothing less
now than learn[ing] how to see [the past] in a new way. One viewer explained this
affective and perceptual reframing like this: One goes on to a discovery in the realm
of cheerfulness. One smiles under tears, one begins to appreciate the power of genuine
humanity that can overcome all adversity (Funke, 1964).
Admittedly, the rendering of this viewing experience may verge on sentimentality;
yet, it is precisely this peculiar affective blend of despondency and light-hearted
laughter that underscores the viewers capacities to recognize in this vernacular
comedy mnemonic residues of the traumatic historical past muffled or shut out from
the central master narrative of anti-fascist rebuilding. The films comic structure,
satirized characters and unexpected turning points, supported by the episodic practices
of the road movie, marginalize the key elements of East Germans memory of the
transition period from the Third Reich to the new socialist order. Thus, issues such
as German victimhood, fallen soldiers and resettlement are constantly alluded to, but
have marginal impactif at allon the story. On the other hand, this meandering,
accidental narration allows the reintroduction of topics that have become semi-taboo
in the national memory discourse of the postwar period, including most notably the
trope of sexual violence. Yet, the film still does not veer towards a classic tragic
comedy. Instead, as elements of Lustspiel, romance and satire fluidly interact, the
film offers a range of newly conceivable (denkbare) plotlines, enabled by the episodic
narrative structures of the road movie.
What, then, happens when these generic archetypes of subject matter that can
be narrated (Erzhlbares) encounter that which is difficult or even impossible to
represent? Drawing on Hanno Loewys insight into the relationship between genre
and historical representation, we may observe that the generic conventions are by
no means relinquished. Instead, it is precisely through the mixing and entangling of
generic structures that films are capable of approaching these ambiguous realities
of historical violence in new and potentially more realistic ways (2003:43, 52). In
Beyers film, this breakthrough towards greater authenticity, beyond the confines of
rigid formal types, draws the spectators attention to the periphery. This orientation
is guided by the films narrative arrangements that, based in a mid-level genre mix,
shape the selective representation of historical realities. In turn, this mediation
29
Anke Pinkert
reverberates in liminal cinematic spaces, more broadly conceived, including minor

plotlines, comments by moviegoers and unanchored diegetic sound. It is through the
films self-reflexive attention to the peripheral spheres of the visual field, then, that
the memory of these traumatic experiences is most effectively negotiated, ordered
and arranged, enabling further deviations from the GDRs memory of anti-fascist
reconstruction. By favoring a visual dramaturgy of the periphery, the film exposes
and thus recirculates its own narrative tempering of sorrow (and more ambivalent
feelings of shame and possibly guilt). This allows the audience to experience a sense
of reparative care and renewal.
Politics of lookingand looking again!

The efficacy of peripheral memory in Beyers postwar film is intimately linked to
consciously marked perceptual operations in the field of vision. Emphasizing the
complex relation between seeing and knowledge from the very start, Carbide and
Sorrel amplifies the role played by the periphery in the shaping of cultural memory
where, in a flexible field of appearance, new contexts are continuously delimited and
formed (Butler, 2009:9). Rather than invoking the dominant iconography of antifascist heroism, prevalent in Beyers previous work Naked among Wolves (1963), this
humorous postwar film opens over an establishing shot of a heap of rubble, positioned
slightly off center and surrounded by the remnants of a bombed-out building whose
empty window frames expose the faade of another house situated in the recess of the
visual field.
Of course, we could simply pass off these empty frames as visual cues for a
naturalistic mise-en-scne of Germany in ruins rather than self-reflexive signs of
perception (Burnett, 1995:5), if it were not for the way in which the main protagonist
is introduced in the film, calling viewers attention to the act of looking/seeing itself.
Suddenly, as if cued by an invisible force, Kalle Blcher emerges behind the heap
of rubble in the stage-like set, while the upbeat, punctuated music score underlines
the comic absurdity of his unharmed appearance seemingly out of nowhere. Half
covered by bricks, with a slight smirk on his face, Kalle looks around, taking stock; a
moment later, the camera tracks out fast, taking the larger site of destruction into view,
including the displaced scrap of a cigarette advertisement that presumably belongs to
the factory in ruins. As the intertitle in this distant year 1945 is imposed onto this
scene, the viewer understands that the historical moment of the end of the war, the
victorydefeat, cannot be grasped in real time and space; it can only be resymbolized
through retrospective mediation. Unlike the emotional accounts of those who had
witnessed Dresdens devastation by Allied bombs, in which 25,000 people were
killed,6 we see Blcher on top of the rubble, dressed in the prototypical working-class
30
outfit reminiscent of the 1920s, hands casually in his pockets, surveying the landscape
of ruins somewhat indecisively and then simply responding with an expletive to the
disaster. Resonating with efforts in earlier DEFA films, including Kurt Maetzigs 1952
film, Young Couple, to consign the air raidsand here most notably the destruction
of Dresdento a prehistoric space, the film resists the legibility of a larger set of
questions regarding Germans culpability and guilt and the impact of those concerns
in the aftermath of the war.
On the other hand, the preliminary dramaturgy of the opening scene refuses to
tap into the ubiquitous appropriation of destroyed German cities as a symbol of
the regenerative powers of the new anti-fascist and later socialist order. Richard
Groschopps monumental 1946 documentary Dresden, for example, cast the rebuilding
of the city right after the war through representations of male strength and physical
intactness. As one reviewer wrote, in Groschopps film one sees tanned, muscular
construction workers in all areas doing their difficult days work, which is a symbol
of the progress that has been made so far (Mckenberger and Jordan, 1994:253).
Lingering in a brief and much more ambiguous moment of defeatvictory in 1945,
the opening scene in Beyers film not only rejects the monumentalizing trope of antifascist victory, supported in the commemorative discourse of the GDR by efforts to
mark the beginning of history in 1945 with the arrival of Soviet troops in Dresden;
it also repudiates the States official cold war discourse that worked against personal
recollection by enshrining the bombing victims of Dresden within a newly emerging
politics of anti-imperialism (Spencer, 1997). Instead of suspending the image of ruin
in a hegemonic narrative, the film takes a more provisional approach, inviting the
viewers, in observing Kalle, to apprehend the historical situation for themselves. As
Blcher is taking stock of the rubble in this brief opening scene, a worker walks up
to him to ask what he is doing there, to which Blcher replies flippantly, Foolish
questionlooking (gucken)!
Notably, the films self-reflexive focus on visual/perceptual agency has far-reaching
implications for the shaping of cultural memory: the mode of free-ranging observing
associated with the main character as a witness to history suggests that the
exploration and the insecurities of watching have not been shifted into a fixed gaze.
There is room for understanding, interpretation, for making sense. This is important
across the protagonists diegetic realm of the 1940s and the viewers past recall in the
1960s. The visual archive of early DEFA films of the 1940s contained traumatized
war returnees whose inability to reintegrate into postwar society was marked by
their permanent immobile stare. Although Blcher is not, strictly speaking, coded
as a returnee (but rather anchored in the proletarian tradition of the ethos of Weimar
cinema in the 1920s),7 it is striking that the films attention to scopic capacities in the
opening scene succeeds in undoing the notion of an impaired postwar masculinity.
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Anke Pinkert
Moreover, shuttling across time and space, a number of key elementsincluding the
surveying gaze of Kalle when he emerges from behind the rubble, the verbal emphasis
on just looking, the tracking shots and the circular pans of the group of workers
telling Kalle about their plan to get carbidebestow this opening scene with a kind of
visual elasticity that undermines the rigor of the imagination in the anti-fascist present
of the early 1960s. As Silverman points out, the look, regulated by social and psychic
forces, is under constant cultural pressure to apprehend the world from a pre-assigned
viewing position (1996:5).
With its emphasis on an ocularcentric paradigm, focused on the eye as the organ of
perception, Beyers film lines up with cinematic practices and theories of the 1960s
and 1970s in the West that, echoing film conceptualizations of the 1920s, privileged
the act of seeing over other modes of affective response (Elsaesser and Hagener,
2010:109). Of course, this orientation towards vision should not be mistaken with
the cinematic space as a phenomenological totality that can be made sense of from
a single point of view. Visual operations have their own contradictions and specular
regimes and, ultimately, they do not have a single location or viewing attached.
Further, Beyer is quite aware that seeing and feeling are not separate, and that the
visual and other senses (e.g., sonic, haptic) interplay in the viewers perception of the
cinematic spectacle as an embodied experience (Elsaesser and Hagener, 2010:110).
But, ultimately, it is the centrality of the visual senseorchestrations of scanning,
seeing and recognizingthat orient the viewer of Carbide and Sorrel to the peripheral
in the visual field, where fleeting images and details reside in the threshold of the
visible (Silverman, 1996). When Blcher explains to the worker that he is only there
to observe and look, the eyes of the two men in the brief exchange of the opening
scene do not meet. Instead, Blchers gaze is directed at the margins of the cinematic
space, the distance outside the frame. In other words, it appears there might be more
to see than meets the eye.
Butler suggests,
The frame never quite determine[s] precisely what it is we see, think, recognize
and apprehend. Something exceeds the frame that troubles our sense of reality;
in other words, something occurs that does not conform to our established
understanding of things (2009:9).
In this process of making sense of the pasts recall, the spectator becomes both an
observer of and participant in the spectacle, working their own memories with and
against the films peripheral visions.
Once this dramaturgy of the periphery is set up in the fast-paced opening scene, and
once, on a narrative level, the group of workers has decided that Kalle will need to get
the carbide necessary to weld together the broken metal beams in order to reconstruct
32
the cigarette factory, Blchers odyssey begins (Beyer, 2001:121). Just as the story
meanders and minor protagonists emerge who cannot always, as one reviewer noted,
be related to the plot (Funke, 1964), the viewersalso sort of by chanceare taken
more closely towards the periphery, towards the margins within an already minor
popular genre of a comedic road movie, where cinematic memory, including glimpses
into the experience of resettlement, war, death and rape, is reconfigured.
German war losses

Without further ado, then, the film cuts from the opening scene to the road, where we
see Kalle Blcher walking with strong strides and optimistic whistling as he embarks
on his adventurous mission. While the films credits are running, a subsequent close
up of the protagonists steps, synchronized with a dynamic music score, produces
metonymic meanings regarding the massive movements that occurred in the postwar
era across various geographical and social landscapes, ranging from Silesia in the east
to America in the west. This emerging discourse of mobility is made explicit in the
next brief scene, where we see people moving in a long shuffling line on the side of
the road. As Blcher briskly walks towards the camera, the group of men, women and
children, who pull handcarts with their belongings and carry bundles on their backs,
moves quietly and orderly in the opposite direction. While, as Von Moltke (2005)
points out, the mere presence of mobility does not tell us much about its particular
function, the contemporary audience would have understood the historical specificity
of the universal wandering depicted in such a scene and associated the moving
crowd with the plight of the expellees from the East who faced the task of relocating.
Images of people trudging on the side of the road had been recurring in the German
landscape, in newsreels, as well as in stories and memoirs that circulated after the war
(Von Moltke, 2005:120, 136138).
The brevity with which the film introduces the trope of relocation, immediately
following the opening scene, is in itself revealing. Although by 1950 four million
Germans from the East had relocated to East Germany, the themes of expulsion and
flight, which were intimately tied up with notions of complicity, could only partially
surface in the cultural imagination of the GDR (Niven, 2013). In the West, however,
the memory of expulsion had become constitutive of national postwar identity,
supported by the widely popular genre of the Heimatfilm, which, indulging the loss of
the homeland, turned German suffering into a generic convention. However, Beyers
brief shots of the evacuees in the margins of the visual field work against spectatorial
identifications with victimhood. The camera shows the displaced people already in
motion, capturing an anonymous group rather than singling out individual faces,
which may have elicited an emotional response similar to the image of an evacuated
33
Anke Pinkert
mother holding a child that dominated the universalized pictorial representations of

resettlement in the West. Instead, the refugees are only shown from behind, their heads
slightly tilted down, as if hanging in shame. As Kalle moves by, he appears to slightly
look over and glance at the people, but then the non-diegetic music quickly absorbs
his indecisiveness and picks up a marching rhythm, as if to propel the protagonist
forward. In this brief, almost imperceptible moment of looking and looking away, the
film creates an ambivalent space, where the protagonist seems unsure how to relate to
the resettlers from the East coming through and the viewers, incited into these visual
and affective operations, are asked to make up their own minds. When suddenly Kalle
turns around and we expect his gaze to be matched with an image of the resettlers he
had just passed, we only see an empty road, where, underscored by fast-paced Kalinka
music and in line with the films satirical/humorous tone, Russian trucks are all too
quickly approaching, as if the cinematic residues of massive turmoil and relocation
were not quite committed to memory.
The second time the trope of resettlement occurs in the films visual margins is in
a comical scene in which Kalle has lost control of a cart that carries the barrels of
carbide he by now has acquired. With the protagonist sitting on top, the wagon is
moving downhill. Through quick cuts between Kalle trying to desperately hold on,
shaky point-of-view shots that emulate the physical feeling of being in motion, and
over-the-shoulder shots from Kalles perspective, the dislocated people are captured
as they are being pushed to the side of the road. A nascent discourse of German loss
and suffering is once more registered in the margins of the visual and discursive field
of postwar memory production. This time the protagonist maneuvers just long enough
through the anonymous crowd for the camera to record some faces, but the perception
is still too short to stabilize these fleeting images into a historical narrative about
the role of expulsion and resettlement in the postwar imaginary. A reviewer in Der
Morgen only noted the scenes comic rhythm, reminiscent of the time lapse in silent
film, and referenced Chaplin movies (Funke, 1964). In this brief moment of speeding
up the images, the camera reaches into the group of resettlers, and their faces turn
into transient dream-like images belonging to a space between the fictional world
of the film and the imaginary realm inhabited by the viewer. What we see here, as
these boundaries remain vague, is that distinctions of internal and external, thought
and vision, are more often than not tools of interpretation (Burnett, 1995:10). As
Kalle shouts for comic effect Bahn frei and Weg daOut of my way!the
film quickly moves through this scene and, mimicked by hand-held camera work,
the protagonist ends up toppling over and is tossed quite literally to the side of the
road, into a dumping ground for waste. The prominently displayed sign Mll abladen
verbotenNo Dumping Allowedmay insinuate self-reflexively that, although
no experience should be disposed at the waste side of history, the remnants of the
34
past are deposited there regardless. A new and potentially more hopeful life in future
prosperity has little room for the impact of past sufferings, let alone complicities and
guilt.
A similar mode of exposing and containing the experience of loss is structured into
the love plot of the comedic travel film. Soon after Kalle has acquired the barrels
of carbide he is supposed to bring to Dresden, he is picked up on the road by Karla,
who appears out of nowhere on a horse-drawn carriage. She is one of several lovelusting women, as one reviewer put it (Lcke, 1964), who appear throughout the
film, offering support to the protagonist who needs to overcome numerous obstacles
as he moves across the country. Following the fast-paced episodic structure of the
film, we soon see Kalle in the house of his new-found friend who, by her own account,
lives with her grandfather and her mother. A moment later we shift to the interior
space of her bedroom. Captured in a mirror enlarged to fill the frame, we see Kalle
and Karla in the background of the bedroom sharing a moment of intimacy. As the
protagonists themselves do not look at their own reflections in the mirror, it is notably
the spectator of the film who is positioned as a witness looking in. Mirroring effects
are conventional cinematic strategies that draw attention to the sliding movement
of significations, involving endlessly circumscribed interpretations of subjectivity
and the act of cinematic mediation itself (Burnett, 1995:2831). What appears to be
highlighted here, however, in this moment attuned to mediation and projection, is the
agency of the viewing subject to choose in the mirror reflection what is important
to make sense of in the scene. Set quite literally in an in-between space, a blurred
photograph of a male head-shoulder shot attached to the mirror intervenes into the
visual field, creating a kind of trialogue that operates through a relay of relations
between the viewer looking in, the couple being looked at, and the enigmatic
photographic image of a man, possibly dressed in a military uniform.
Deaths of Wehrmacht soldiers who fought in Hitlers war are elusive in this
cinematic comedy about the immediate postwar year. While five million German
men lost their lives in the Second World War, in Beyers film husbands die of heart
attacks, brothers are simply not mentioned and fathers succumb to old age. Precisely
because Karla never indicates her marital status and the absence of a male partner
does not reach a discursive status, it is up to the spectator to endow the faint image,
that appears for just a moment, with meaning or to let it slip away. Situated at the
vanishing point of visionnot quite in focus, not quite gonethe body of this absent,
possible missing or dead other appears to float in an ethereal universe, to draw on
Burnetts formulation (1995:29), just out of grasp and thus outside the time-bound
configuration of the present it inhabits. At the same time, the contours of the uniform
make it appear as if the diffuse image in the liminal surface space of the mirror holds
some sort of clue to the spectators subjective experience of re-viewing the relations
35
Anke Pinkert
between the pre-45 past and post-45 present constructed in this scene. This process
is open-ended. From the perspective of the 1960s, and the GDRs collective/official
mnemonic framework centered on anti-fascist resistance, the viewer twenty years
after the end of the war needed to draw from modes of personal, communicative or
familial remembering in order to imagine the experiences across a historical rupture
presented from within the periphery in the visual field.
But, then, do memories in the present overlay the viewers vision, or do particular
perceptions enable memories of the past? And what is the role played by unnamable,
partially shared historical experience in this process of resignification? The last
vignette in Beyers film I would like to discuss here in an effort to outline a conception
of peripheral memoryas a space in the narrative and visual margins where remains
of the past are reanimated and offered to the spectatoraddresses these questions
with regard to the sexual abuse of German woman by Russian soldiers at the end of
the war. Midway into his journey, Blcher encounters a young girl, who, like most
of the displaced characters in the film, appears suddenly on the scene, coming out of
a forest and onto the road quite literally from the margins. With her braids, flushed
cheeks and a small suitcase in hand, this minor character resembles the archetypal
child in a Grimms fairy tale or a spunky rascal more than a girl who, by her own
account, just lost her mother in an air raid of Berlin and whose father died in battle.
The scene overwrites any potential feelings of pain and grief related to these war
losses with a snappy exchange between Kalle and the girl:
Where are you coming from?
From Berlin.
And where are you going?
To America!
Well to America, its okay until Magdeburg, but then it stretches.
Underscored by a quick cut between Kalle and the girl, a Russian soldier who offers
her food, and a corpulent operetta singer returning from war, whose desiring face
could be directed at the girl or the food she is offered, the scene reworks the historical
experience of women feeling fearful and vulnerable during the early weeks of Soviet
occupation into a comfortable gender tableau.
The subsequent shots, however, begin to gravitate towards incongruent meanings
and rifts in this encasement. Following through with the narrative motivations
of mishaps and obstacles characteristic of both the comedic genre and the road
movie, the three charactersBlcher, the operetta singer/returnee and the girlget
stranded overnight and decide to stay in an abandoned boathouse. What we see
next (or, more importantly, do not see) tells us as much about the ways in which
the postwar crisis of gender relations was reimagined in the cultural memory of
36
the 1960s as it signals how precarious these symbolizations really were. Especially
when brought into the vicinity of pressures coming from the visual and discursive
periphery of normative representations, these fictionalized meanings begin to slide.
The gendered codes around which the war orphan is constructed shift between
child, precocious girl and young woman. This modulation does not only depend
on the respectively different ways in which Kalle and the returnee perceive the
girlKalle treats her like a child, puts her on the truck like a little girl, covers her
with a blanket, whereas the returnee joins her in the boat where she nestles in for
the nightthe slippery sexualized identifications of the girl also rely on imagined
modes of female agency. With much dismay Blcher says to the returnee: Hey, dont
even think about it, to which he replies sheepishly: Pfui, how can you think that
way, she is only a child. But then when we zoom into the intimate interior of the
boat, the girl offers herself in a seemingly uncomplicated and light-hearted way as a
sexual mate to the feisty returnee: Im already seventeen, I only look that young.
Since, at this point, the returnee had already agreed to take her along to the West,
the girls pass appears to be an expression of her own sexual curiosity rather than
a calculated bribe needed for survival. The rest is left to our imagination, but most
likely the viewer will conjure up an image of consensual sex between strangers,
as it is the main trope around which the films historical imaginary stabilizes the
postwar gender crisis.
However, just when the associative semantic chain of comfort created by the
girls casual proposition, the feisty grin of the opera singer and the soundly sleeping
Blcher begin to lull the spectator into a fantasy of postwar sexual vitality and ease,
the image fades to black and reopens over Kalle, who is awakened by a piercing
sound that comes from the off-screen diegetic realm of the film. A female voice
shouts Heeellp! with such tormented, desperate force that it breaks the comic
light-hearted register of the film for just this moment. As we hear the voice but
do not see the character, the scream appears to roam free (Chion, 1999:129131),
wavering over the image of Kalles startled face. Unlike the other peripheral details
I have discussed here so far, the panicked voice of the girl appears powerful enough
to retrospectively throw the discourse of gender bonds into doubt, even expose it
as illusion within that splinter of a second. From Kalle the camera cuts to the lake,
where we see the girl struggling for her life and almost drowning. As the shots
over the water underscore permeable meanings associated with flow and fluidity,
the girls scream continues to traverse the unbound visual field. Yet, this scene also
anchors the meaning of the scream within the inner diegesis of the film, when it
turns out the returnee and the girl had tried to escape in the morning, wanting to
leave Kalle Blcher and the cumbersome carbide barrels behind. Precisely for that
brief moment, however, when, following the fade to black, the girls horrified voice
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Anke Pinkert
from outside the frame had not been secured in a knowable narrative structure or
visual image, the scene was punctured and associative meanings of sexual violence,
fear and death seeped into DEFAs postwar memory production.
What, then, does it mean for us (and the viewer at the time) to listen to this voice
coming from the periphery of the films imaginary and the margins of the cinematic
space, here more largely conceived as a space that is both discursive and physical,
one where film and spectator, cinema and body encounter one another (Elsaesser and
Hagener, 2010:4)? The reviews are silent on this. If the blurred photograph in the
mirror scene, discussed earlier, can see forever (Burnett, 1995:28), then what are
the meanings transported by this scream into the present? Up to this point in the
story, the viewer could still make sense of it as an unconscious slippage, a persistent
residue of historical trauma shooting through the optimistic, albeit more provisional
and small-scale, recall of 1945 as a new beginning. But the sequence at the lake,
where the girl is in danger of drowning, is followed by a carefully arranged scene that
appears to deliberately enable and enact lingering suspicions about the girls sexual
abuse through a space of indeterminacy in the visual periphery. When, following the
incident at the lake, Kalle Blcher and the girl spend the night in a bombed-out ruin of
a bridge, their platonic relation is secured through the moral integrity and paternalistic
attitude of the main protagonist. However, when Blcher, positioned close to her,
offers his jacket for her to sleep on, the girl sees something there (underscored by the
punctuated music as a moment of Schreck) and the spectatorial gaze is directed, for a
splinter of a second, towards a gap in the fabric, as the girls facial expression changes
from contentment to fear. She decides to lie down, but in the subsequent shot we see
her run away the next morning.
In the context of the films overall emphasis on the scopic field, we might
acknowledge that the scenes representational work lodges a mnemic implant or
sign into a temporal continuum (Silverman, 1996:4), a sign that is lit up when it
is perceived and brought into the vicinity of meanings related to sexual abuse in the
earlier lake sequence. Similar to the other instances of peripheral memory in the
film, the space of open-ended meaning cannot be totalized as historical narrative;
there is something in the affective response of the girl that eludes the viewer, no matter
how often we repeat the re-viewing of the margins in the field of vision. Further out on
the edges of perception than the other examples, the sign of sexual anxiety/violence
risks being drained of value. However, it is precisely here in this (still noticeable)
slippage, I suggest, that a kind of participatory union between the seer and the seen
is retrospectively enacted, enabling, if not demanding, the viewers engagement in
the reformulation of memory from the periphery. As Silverman explains, esthetic
texts abound with visual and rhetorical images, which even before being psychically
worked over, have the properties of highly charged unconscious memories. At the
38
same time, they are available to conscious scrutiny and interrogation. Implicit here is
the possibility for each of us to have
psychic access to what does not belong to usof remembering other peoples
memories. And through these borrowed memories, we can accede psychically to
pains, pleasures and struggles which are far removed not only from our own, but
from what normative representation validates, as well (Silverman, 1996:4).
We cannot know for sure if contemporary viewers of the 1960s, from the perspective
of their various contingent positions and subjectivities, would have recognized the
historical specificity of the girls anxious gaze performed in this scene. And if they
did, would they have related this charged sign associating a womans sexual anxiety
with postwar devastation to the memory of another, to their own memory, or, in
some way, to the echo of collective experiences transmitted through communicative
remembering of story telling, but not legible in official discourse? Moreover, would
the audience have been struck by the various substitutions taking place in this
sequence, where an underlying anxiety of sexual abuse was notably dissociated from
any complicity of the Russian occupying forces who play a central, albeit not entirely
normative, role in the film?
Representational traces in the cultural archive of East Germany show that the
experiences of impaired sexual relations between men and women in the immediate
postwar years, as well as allusions to the mass rape committed by Russian soldiers at the
end of the war, were passed on (Heineman, 1999; Naimark, 1995), if incompletely, in the
literary and cinematic imagination, including Konrad Wolfs I was 19 (1965) and Christa
Wolfs novel Patterns of Childhood (1976:518). In her discussion of the suppressed
cultural discourse on rape of German women by Russian soldiers, Birgit Dahlke
suggests that this silencing (Tabuisierung) was not only because such discourse would
not correspond to the official image of the brother country, but also due to the lingering
existence of disgust in regard to the violated female body, which signified the injury and
defeat of men (2000:293). If the early DEFA film Street Acquaintances (Peter Pewas,
1948) in the 1940s acknowledged the female body suffering from venereal disease, in
the film of the 1960s it is a disembodied voice heard only for a second through which
the traumatic echoes of sexual violations break through in the margins of the visual field.
This shift troubles the postwar imagination in the present, raising questions about vision
and knowledge in the production of memory itself, and inciting the daring viewer and
listener to take up and perpetually reformulate this resonant perception.
Beyers comedic road movie itself opts for an ending with more closure, albeit one
that still resists the more politicized narrative of anti-fascist reconstruction. Following
the reconciliatory impulse of comedy (Loewy, 2003:42) and the conventions of
travel narratives as a search for home (Bttcher, 2013:337), Blcher returns with his
39
Anke Pinkert
minimal cargo of carbide to the starting point of his journey, the factory in Dresden.
In a move that undermines the official trope of the exemplary anti-fascist male citizen
jump-starting postwar society one more time, Blcher decides to leave the factory and
instead joins Karla, the woman he had met on the road and who is now pregnant, in
order to build a new family life.
Conclusion
War-related losses and the mass death of Germans, let alone the destruction of the
European Jews, are mostly absent in this light-hearted satirical rendition of the
year 1945. This is not surprising in itself, given the ambivalent place of German
deaths in the official anti-fascist memory discourse (Margalit, 2010) and the
generic conventions that frame the cultural memory produced in this film as a site
of enjoyment and popular entertainment. But comedy, of course, can and has been
deployed for serious subject matters, including tropes of historical violence. We have
been able to observe the relative flexibility of the generic form in the peripheral spaces
of both the narrative structure and particularly the field of vision in Beyers film.
Rather than applying a normative approach to East German DEFA productions, the
traces and echoes of losses in the margins show how the public medium of film, even
under the conditions of circumscribed cultural politics, participated in reshaping a
contingent cultural postwar memory. Here the films dramaturgy of the peripheryas
an animation of past experience through a self-reflexive focus on operations of seeing/
gazinglets us apprehend most effectively how cultural memory constitutes itself in
the continual interplay of fiction, elision and recall. More importantly, we may also
learn to appreciate that the erosion of loss itself might be necessary in order to start
over (Aug, 2004:viiiix).
The attempt to grant a film an apprehending eye, ear or even a motivated silence can
become an opportunity to re-dream narrative and structural potentialities. Since people
are uniquely capable of initiatives that may interrupt a chain of events set in motion,
new beginnings cannot be ruled out even when society seems locked in stagnation or
set on a seemingly inexorable course (Arendt, 1998:vii). Media spectacles do not freeze
viewers in positions that they cannot control or change. In fact, Burnett reminds us:
[N]otions of spectator and spectacle need to be recast as instances of oscillation
between the control implicit in acts of seeing and the parallel loss of control in
every act of watching. This simultaneity of power and loss creates the possibility
of openings for the imaginary (1995:6).
For the shaping of cinematic, cultural memory, what is perceived to be on screen is
as important as what is left out or only hovering at the perimeter. Beyer insists on the
40
capacity of cinema to mobilize the periphery as a site where spectatorial participation

in the workings of memory itself allows for a re-beginning. The film self-reflexively
comments on this selective strategy or is at least aware of it and, in an act of giving,
passes it on to the viewers attention.
Since the comedic film interprets the immediate postwar past through a decidedly
presentist lens, the visual scaffolding of each episode in Blchers journey, selected for
an analysis of peripheral perception here, reminds the spectator that, as Astrid Erll puts it,
[M]emories are small islands in a sea of forgetting In processing our experience of
reality, forgetting is the rule and remembering the exception. Indeed, the functions
of forgetting within cognitive and social systems are at least as important as those
of remembering. However, in the end, the phenomenon of forgetting is every
bit as unobservable as is memory. As an object of research it only comes into view
via the observation of rememberingby considering its peculiarities, mistakes
and changes (2011:9).
Rather than focusing on what has been repressed in official memory or what
traumatically haunts (and could thus be revealed through symptomatic readings),
Beyers postwar comedy at the edge of catastrophe shows that thinking through
conceptions of the periphery in memory work also allows insights into the role of
forgetting as a protective, even productive and reparative force. Beyers comic film
reminds us memory and oblivion stand together; both are necessary for the full use of
time. The film pleads against the haughty melancholy of positions stopped in their
tracks, and for the active engagement of the mind, encouraging those who intend to
struggle against the hardening of the imagination (it threatens all of us) to not forget
to forget in order to lose neither memory nor curiosity. Oblivion brings us back to the
present (Aug, 2004:89). Seen in this light, peripheral memory holds open the
space for the spectator to re-view and decide what should drift away and what needs
to be pulled in more fully into the present consciousness in order to envision the past
as a vantage point for a more livable future.
NOTES
1
I would like to thank Renate Gthe at the Pressedokumentations of the Hochschule

fr Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf, Potsdam-Babelsberg, for her assistance in
obtaining the review articles of the film.
Im following Elsaessers and Wedels conception of films, presupposing a cinematic
41
Anke Pinkert
space that is both physical and discursive, one where film and spectator, cinema
and body encounter one another. This includes the architectural arrangement of the
spectatorial space, a temporal ordering of performances, a specific social framing of
the visit to the movie theater, the sensory envelope of sound and other perceptual
stimuli, the imaginary construction of filmic space through mis-en-scne, montage
and narration, as well as the communication of bodies, settings and objects within
the film with each other and with the spectator (Elsaesser and Hagener, 2010:4).
3
When, for fear of trivializing, cultural critics at the time reminded Beyer that a comedy
with tragic accents might have been the more appropriate choice for a story set in
Germany at year zero, Beyer replied that he viewed the separation between comedy
and the supposedly more shallow genre of the Lustspiel, or even Volksstueck, with
its orientation to broader audience appeal, to be untenable (Richter, 1994:174175).
According to Jugendentscheid No. 33 662 of March 17, 1965, in the West, the film
was released for viewers aged 12 and up.
James Chandler defines sympathy as a component which connects one sensorium

with another by enabling us to face one another, adopt one anothers point of view
(2013: xvii).
The writer Gerhart Hauptmann, for example, wrote after the air raid of Dresden
on February 1718, 1945: Wer das Weinen verlernt hat, der lernt es wieder beim
Untergang von Dresden [He who has forgotten how to cry learns it again at the
ruin of Dresden] (Naumann, 1998:43).
Geschonneck himself was imprisoned during the Third Reich. He played a workingclass Communist associated with Weimar in Konrad Wolfs Sun Seeker (1958) and
a Communist leading the anti-fascist resistance in Buchenwald in Beyers Naked
among Wolves (1963).
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Hofmann. (1963). Ein lachender Held. Symptome eines echten Lustspiels im DEFA
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about: Carbide and Sorrel, a hearty DEFA comedy with Erwin Geschonneck].
Freiheit, Halle, February 4.
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the building of the Wall and Kahlschlag. 1961 to 1965]. In Ralf Schenk and
Christiane Mckenberger (eds.), Das Zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg:
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45
Soviet reflections: Music, nostalgia and personhood

among (post-)Soviet immigrants in America1
AMY GAREY
ABSTRACT
Drawing on data from Soviet-era folk song festivals in the midwestern United States,
this article argues that Soviet nostalgia is a practice directed towards constructions
of history as well as personally experienced pasts. The objects of nostalgia at these
events are not songs, material goods or even, necessarily, the past. Instead, nostalgia
gets expressed for representations of Soviet time and space. At these festivals, people
are neither here (America) nor there (the Soviet Union) and are neither Americans
nor Soviets. The bounds of an intermediate identity space, Russian, get hammered
out in the way (post-)Soviet immigrants discuss Americans, Russians and Soviets.
Discourse analysis of conversation at and about these festivals illustrates the semiotic
mechanisms of nostalgia, speaking to relationships between history and memory,
society and the individual, and tradition and change.
Introduction
People were singing Soviet-era songs around campfires, flying the hammer and
sickle, and wearing jackets lettered with
. But we were not in Cold War Russia;
this happened in Wisconsin, in 2006, at a gathering of over three hundred Russian
speakers. Some people drove hundreds of miles to attend this festival in the forest,
stuffing their cars with tents, guitars, dogs and children. Groups in America, Australia,
Canada, Israel, France and many post-Soviet states hold campouts like these. Such
organizations, called KSP (Klub samodeiatelnoi pesni, or Club of Amateur Song),

began in the Soviet Union as a way to perform music not sanctioned by the state.
Now, of course, immigrants do not need to escape to the wilds of Wisconsin to sing
no-longer-subversive songs. What draws people to these events? Further, why would
a largely Jewish pool of immigrants invoke the symbols of a regime many made great
sacrifices to flee?
Perhaps they are nostalgic for KSP festivals of their youth. But while some
participants were active in the samodeiatelnaia pesnia movement in the USSR, others
learned songs sung at campouts only after immigrating to the United States. At first
glance, it seems that people miss something they never experienced. Most definitions
of nostalgia require that it involve memories of a past that is irretrievably gone
(Davis, 1979). How can immigrants feel nostalgia, though, without the accompanying
memories? KSP thus presents twin paradoxes: why would Eastern Europeans long
either for an event that has lost its political resonance or for songs never before sung?
KSP becomes less mysterious if one delinks memory and nostalgia. As the ubiquity
of campy 1950s movie posters in twenty-first century dorm rooms proves, nostalgia
is as often for an imagined history as for personal experience (Wilson, 2005).2 In
fact, Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia as ...a longing for a home that no longer
exists or has never existed (2001:xiii; emphasis added). The objects of nostalgia
at KSP are not songs, material goods or even, necessarily, the past (cf. Stewart,
1988). Instead, participants levy nostalgia at representations of Soviet time and
spacechronotopes in Bakhtins (2004:84) sense of a time-space-person amalgam.
Anyone can voice nostalgia for a chronotopic representation, even if they never lived
in the Soviet Union. While personal memories are nearly always part of nostalgic
reflections, I wish to interrogate how nostalgic discourses reproduce tradition in ways
that are not bound by actual recollection (which is often mis-remembered, anyway).
Nostalgia as an emotion, as a practice and as a semiotic construct functions to keep a
Soviet cosmology alive for immigrants and their children alike, on the periphery of
the Soviet imagined community (Anderson, 2006).
KSP campouts in America provide a unique contrast to Soviet nostalgia in other sites,
as they establish that even nostalgia mediated by the same objectsthe hammer
and sickle, Soviet-era songs, Soviet military paraphernaliavaries depending on
the context in which it is expressed. Soviet-bloc emigres in the United States live in
very different structural conditions than do those undergoing political and economic
transition in post-Soviet nation states, and, thus, are generally excluded from analyses
of socialist nostalgia. Maria Todorova argues that socialist nostalgia expresses one of
two sentiments: (1) a critique of the post-socialist present or (2) disappointment, social
exhaustion, economic recategorization, generational fatigue, and quest for dignity...
(2010:7). The diaspora, though, does not have to manage the disappointments of
47
Amy Garey
revolution, and all of the immigrants I spoke with were better off, materially, than they
had been in the USSR. Interestingly, however, nostalgic discourses were still used to
critique present circumstances. In the midwestern US, KSP participants mobilized an
idealized socialist past to criticize American consumerism.
To illustrate how Russians in America engage with socialist nostalgia, I sketch
the history of the KSP movement, describe how chronotopes were discursively
constructed by immigrants at campouts in the midwestern US, and show how both
ironic voicing and wistful framing of the past deployed the language of the Soviet
state in order to disassociate from it.3 Finally, I demonstrate how casting the Soviet
nostalgia of immigrants in terms of chronotopes resolves overlapping categories of
nostalgia. Discourse analysis of conversation at and about these festivals illustrates
the semiotic mechanisms of nostalgia, speaking to relationships between history and
memory, society and the individual, and tradition and change.
Unbreakable union
I can walk by myself, slurred a man to three other campers, leaning against a
tree even as he pleaded sobriety. One of the men looped his arm through that of his
inebriated friend to help him stand, then the other two linked up as well. As the four
men marched arm-in-arm and out-of-step down a road leading to a campsite, they
began singing the unmistakable strains of the Hymn of the Soviet Union (Gimn
Sovetskogo Soiuza) Soiuz nerushimyi (Unbreakable union). All four wore
headlamps, and the beams of light bobbing among the trees made them look like
displaced miners. It was a surreal scene in a state park more commonly overrun with
Boy Scouts.
Though the lyrics evoked Soviet propaganda, the interactional meaning of the song
was more satire than serious that night in Wisconsin. The men distanced themselves
from the hymns lyrics via irony, which is one of the ways symbols once considered
political have changed in their American instantiations. As Konstantin Tarasov
asked about the future of amateur song after Communism, What makes up the
framework of a genre that has stopped being an alternative? ( 2001:10). The rest of
this essay addresses that question.
KSP Midwest and Bard-Klub Midwest are organizations of Russian-speaking
immigrants who hold concerts and campouts in Illinois and Wisconsin. Bard-Klub
Midwest was founded in 2003, and KSP Midwest began holding campouts in 2005.
Each organization runs two campouts per year, one in the spring and one in the fall,
for a total of four annual festivals for the Illinois and Wisconsin regions. My data
include recorded interviews with KSP participants and field notes from campouts
in September 2006, April 2007 and September 2007. I attended the events with
48
acquaintances and secured interviews both among these people and others that I met
at the campouts.4 Most of the people that I spoke with were Jewish, in their thirties
or forties, and had immigrated to the United States with their parents after the US
Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik amendment in 1974.
The number of attendees at midwest campouts ranges from 200 to 600. Events
last three days, with most people arriving on Friday evening and leaving on Sunday.
I arrived at my first event on the Friday evening before my birthday, on September
15, 2006. Knowing that it was my birthday weekend and that I was studying Russian
culture, a friend invited me to tag along with him and his girlfriend. I had not known
what to expect, exactly, so the sight of hundreds of Russian speakers singing, eating
and partying in a Wisconsin campground took me by surprise. Children laughed
and played. Men grilled shashlik. During the day people hiked, played cards and
snacked. Nights, though, were reserved for music. The key event of the weekend
was a concert on Saturday night, but jam sessions around the campfire lasted until
dawn on Friday and Saturday. Anyone who signed up could sing in the concerts,
and while informants ruefully wished for one, there was no audition process. During
the concert, which lasted around three hours, people sat in lawn chairs or crouched
on fallen logs.
At a campout I attended later, in 2007, the smells of pine, beer and roasted meat
wafted through the campgrounds. The air went from crisp to biting as the evening
wore on, and people jockeyed for spots near fires. Men who had earlier in the evening
worn blue-and-white striped Soviet Navy t-shirts (telniashki) put on sweatshirts
and black leather jackets. After the concert people hung out around campfires, either
sticking with groups of friends or following particular artists from the concert. The
singing lasted until dawn. Drinking didnt even stop at sunrise.
Most attendees were young professionals, most married, many with children
nearby. That said, the vodka flowed freely, singing got loud, and at one campout
police were called (by Americans, clearly). My position as an American in a sea
of Slavs was odd and conspicuous. At my first slet (KSP campout),5 I told people
that Id come with Vasilii and Liuba, and everyone seemed fine with that. At two
subsequent events, after I had decided to write about the campouts, I said I was
studying KSP. I spoke Russian with everyone but one person, Ivan (quoted later in
this article), who insisted on speaking English with me.
All of the people I interviewed from the sleti had professional identities outside
of the immigrant community. Ivan was an engineer; Vika an accountant; Vasily
a real estate agent; Iakob a computer programmer. Two University of Chicago
undergraduates who regularly attended East Coast sleti also talked to me about their
experiences. In this study, my aim was neither to survey the overall lifestyles of
Russian-speaking immigrants in Chicago nor to pin down stable immigrant selves.
49
Amy Garey
My focus was, instead, to examine the ways in which KSP campouts functioned
as a Soviet chronotope, attending to the actions and utterances participants used to
proactively construct this Soviet-marked time-space in the US.
In order to understand what is interactionally referenced when immigrants gather
at KSP campouts, we must consider the origins of these events in the former Soviet
Union. Since the Soviet music industry was tightly regulated, musicians who wrote,
sang and distributed their music independently did so outside of official channels.
Even though not all, or even most, samodeiatelnaia pesni were politically sensitive,
they were suspect because they were not state-regulated (Frumkin, 1989:287).
In the Soviet era, samodeiatelnaia pesnia songwriters voiced opinions that could not
be expressed in state media channels. Bulat Okudzhava, considered one of the founders
of avtorskaia pesnia (Smith, 1984:111), impressed Morris Sinelnikov, an immigrant
songwriter from the Ukraine, because his songs were about us, about how we feel,
about how we live (interview with author, July 12, 2007).6 These songs hit on truths
obscured by Soviet propaganda, truths such as the impact of the Gulag on individuals
(Vysotskys My friend left for Magadan), the practice of labeling dissidents insane
(Vysotskys No mistake), or simply the inanity of bureaucracy (Galichs The Red
Triangle). Sinelnikov stated that the most important criterion for performing a song
at KSP campouts in the USSR was that it was not an official, state-sponsored song.
Even American, British and French songs were preferable to Soviet ones. He also cited
youthful rebellion as a reason to favor any music that was prohibited, if only because
they were told they could not listen to it. Young people are always like that, he said.
Part of samodeiatelnaia pesnias appeal was its emphasis on sincerity and honesty
qualities Soviet mass song was perceived to lack (Platonov, 2005:2223).
The relationship between KSP and state regulation was complicated. While the
genre of samodeiatelnaia pesnia was a-Soviet (if not always anti-Soviet), the state
youth organization, the Komsomol, became heavily involved in KSP administration
in the 1960s (Garey, 2011:89; Platonov, 2005:42). Though the Komsomol directed
most public concerts, unlicensed events such as the All-Russia Bard Concert in
Akademgorodok in 1968 still occurred (Mesiak, 1998:609610). In fact, this event was
so controversial that the Komsomol did not license Moscow-region samodeiatelnaia
pesnia concerts again until 1975 (Daughtry, 2006:283). Groups of people still traveled
to forests to play, sing and socialize without state permission, though (Tarasov,
2001:9). To dodge censors, information about KSP was often distributed via word
of mouth. Tonya Hovonova remembers Moscow area KSP events as conducted in
secret, [you were told] what train you should take and where you should go. Then you
walk on for a long while, and then you come to a place and they sing songs, things like
that (Dornhelm and Jarrell, 2003).
It should not be forgotten, though, that people ultimately listen to music because
50
they enjoy it. Some KSP attendees may have interpreted their actions through a
political lens. Others simply went to have a good time. KSP in the Soviet Union, as in
Wisconsin, was above all fun. The fact that some concerts were state-sponsored may
have mattered little to those who went primarily to hear music.7 Defining practices
as state or non-state, Soviet or a-Soviet, draws artificial distinctions; there was state
intervention in all aspects of what could be considered private life in the USSR.
Elements of both force and farce characterized the Soviet bureaucratic machine, and
the relationship between the state and KSP participants entailed grudging acceptance
on both sides. Immigrant relationships to the Soviet past are equally ambivalent.
Were all Russians here: Shifters and ethnic categories

Liuba, Vasilii and I drove into a recreation area near Baraboo, Wisconsin, at dusk on
a Friday evening. As we wound our way through the park looking for our campsite,
Vasilii noted of passersby, There are some Russians (Vot russkie). He punctuated
the drive with more observations, gesturing with his chin: Russian (russkii). Ours
(nashi). Russians (russkie). After one of the sightings, I asked Vasilii how he could
tell. He replied, He walks like a Russian. Other give-aways included facial structure
and clothing.
Neither Liuba nor Vasilii are ethnic Russians, though. Liuba is Ukrainian and Vasilii
is from Belarus. Both are Jewish, and the term for ethnic Russians, russkii, would
not have been applied to them in the USSR or in modern-day Russia. Ukrainians,
Estonians and Belarusians would also not be called russkii. Nonetheless, people
at KSP referred to each other as russkii regardless of ethnicity or nationality. Among
most US immigrants the term Russian has shifted to mean Soviet or postSoviet. This is, in part, accommodation to Americans predilection to label everyone
from the USSR Russian (Andrews, 1999:2; Boym, 2001:332), and its partly due
to the pan-Soviet frame of KSP. The fact that many KSP participants emigrated when
Russia was the economically, politically and culturally hegemonic republic in the
USSR also influences how people imagine what Russia represents. When I asked
Ivan, a 35-year-old Jewish immigrant from Belarus why he called himself russkii, he
responded, Youre thinking Russia as in the Russia. But you gotta be thinking Russia
as in the Soviet Union. Russian takes on special meaning, then, when used in the
United States. It becomes conflated with Russian-speaking immigrant. This process
of lumping Jewish, Ukrainian and Belarusian Russian speakers into one category
is similar to what Laitin observed among beached diasporas of ethnic Russians
in former Soviet republics (1998:9192). But unlike the cases Laitin studied, these
speakers have beached themselves.
One of the attractions of American campouts is that they are opportunities to
51
Amy Garey
interact with other immigrants, whom they dub ours (nashi). KSP in America is
appealing because people, as Vasilii remarked, are all Russians here [at KSP].
Max, a twenty-one-year-old college student and amateur musician, noted that he
considered a Russian-speaking Croatian russkii because he had knowledge of
[Russian] rock songs, some bard songs and spoke Russian. He claimed that
a Croatian fits under the Russian category at KSP (emphasis added). In other
contexts, he implied, he would not be called russkii (interview with author, October
17, 2007). The word russkii comes to mean virtually everyone who attends KSP,
in contrast to the wider American community.
Even within Chicago, though, how russkii got used varied. Vasilii identified
Liuba as a Ukrainian when we were introduced (ona ukrainka), but referred to her
as russkaia in most other situations. Shockingly, sometimes people will even say
he is a Russian Russian (on russkii russkii) to indicate a non-Jewish Russian.
Since such a large percentage of Russian immigrants in America are Jewish, it has
become the norm in some communities to assume that all Russian speakers are
as well. The residual, ethnic-Russian-only meaning of russkii is thus preserved,
and sometimes used to differentiate (aberrant) Russian Russians from (normative)
Jewish Russians.
Words can change meaning depending on how they are used (russkii), as can
songs (Gimn sovetskogo souiza) and even entire events (campouts), with each
of these larger-scale extrapolations relying on smaller semiotic building blocks.
And each song, symbol and utterance implies an orientation towards the Soviet
past. The festival itself as a cultural text gets transposed into different contexts,
changing both the meaning of the original event and the social situations in which
it is embedded. In all cases, people interpret symbols via a synthesis of shared
and individual knowledge, and change results from the tensions between the two.
Why 600 immigrants met to camp and sing probably had little to do with love of
the outdoors or of Russian bard musicor not that alone. At KSP, people interacted
with others who shared specific cultural knowledge, knew the songs they knew and
got their jokes. This knowledge influenced peoples modes of relating to each other,
or the participation framework of KSP (Goffman, 1974:21). Being ordinary is not
a no-effort default setting in social setting. Rather, norms are situationally defined
(Sacks, 1984). KSP campouts are opportunities for immigrants to be ordinary
Russians, something rare in American society.
While the Soviet state no longer exists, the cultural forms that constituted the nation
do. Common understandings of Soviet-era references link immigrants. Mexican,
Indian and Greek migrs can imagine diasporic community with reference to
contemporaneous nation-states. Similarly, Benedict Anderson observes that settlers
in the New World imagined life as synchronous with their European counterparts
52
(2006:188). But because the system that united Soviet successor states is gone,
Soviet immigrants can only reference common knowledge about Soviet-era society,
or a Soviet social imaginary (Ricoeur, 1991).
Soviet sociality at campouts was performed literally through song, but also enacted
in the way people drew upon a common knowledge base. A joke Vasilii spontaneously
made at the September 2006 campout illustrates the interactional function of
presupposed pop cultural knowledge. The joke was based on lines from a popular
1966 movie, Kavkazskaia plennitsa, ili Novye prikliucheniia Shurika (Girl Prisoner of
the Caucasus, or the New Adventures of Shurik), in which a student is kidnapped from
a camping trip. In the film, a folklorist goes to the Caucasus to research traditional
toasts. But the toasts all include drinking and the social scientist cannot handle his
liquor. Predictable hilarity results. One of the movies scenes revolves around the
(drunken) folklorists misunderstanding of a toasts moral:
Toaster: A small bird said, Im going to fly by myself straight to the sun. And
he flew higher and higher. And soon he fellLets drink to the fact that none of
us will fly so high. That none of us will ever thus break away from the collective.
Whats the matter with you?
Folklorist: [crying] Poor bird! (Gaidai, 1967).
At the September 2006 campout, Liuba was standing slightly outside a circle of people.
Vasilii asked her, Why have you broken away from the collective? (Pochemu ty
otorvalas ot kollectiva). This phrase immediately referenced the joke in the movie,
but it was also a pun on the campout experience depicted in the film. Thats why it
was such a good joke: a double pun. And part of its pleasure was that it relied on
knowledge that the general American population would not have. This joke could
only be made in an immigrant context.
The participation frameworks of the sleti influenced how Russians negotiated both
space and social relations. As Vasiliis observations of a Russian walk indicate, some
of these habits are automatic. Others, such as not shaking hands across a threshold,
taking your shoes off in the house (or tent), and sitting quietly before leaving for a
trip are consciously acknowledged guidelines. When walking with a group of people
at the September campout, one woman even scooted into me rather than let a pole
separate us; it is considered bad luck in Russia.
In contrast, a couple with whom I had attended the April 2007 campout held a
barbecue at their house and invited three other frequent KSP attendees. The crowd was
comprised exclusively of immigrants, a fire burned in the backyard and someone had
even brought a guitar. According to Vasilii, the man played well, but he only played
American songs. So Vasilii went inside. You know, when I am with Russians, I
want to hear Vagonchiki8 or something fun like that, he told me. If they want to
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hear that other stuff, they can go to Carnegie Hall or something. Thus, the setting
the shared understanding of the campout space as Soviethelps determine how
people socialize and what songs they expect to be played. The moment-by-moment
constitution of a Soviet participation framework relies on presuppositions about
the proper way to behave, which language people should speak and what kinds of
songs should be sung. Taking cultural knowledge for granted, in turn, reinscribes its
normative nature.
Homo sovieticus: Person, time and chronotope

Chronotopic representations are not accomplished in a neat, bounded, uniform way,
as they would be in a newspaper article or film. Rather, what people talk about, what
jokes they tell and what songs they sing conjure an image of the USSR. Much as
children will key a play frame that organizes a speech event (e.g., Im Luke and
youre Vader) (Goffman, 1974:43-44), KSP campers approach the experience with a
certain understanding of how to behave. And just as an image of the Death Star will
emerge through the childrens dialogue even if they never explicitly describe it, Soviet
chronotopes materialize in interaction.
Deanna Davidson, for example, illustrates how spatial and temporal adverbs
undergird East German chronotopes. Words such as here and there and now
and then index affiliation with the Ossi past (2007:219). In a similarly indirect way,
at KSP chronotopes were conjured in strips of interaction like the joke referenced
above, through performances, and through the habitus generated via accommodation
to a Soviet-marked participation framework. A Soviet worldview was selectively
referenced largely because people operated within a Soviet frame, or as Vasilii put
it, a Russian bubble. The idea of KSP as a bubble maps neatly onto the idea of
cultural chronotope (Agha, 2007). As Asif Agha explains, A chronotopic depiction
formulates a sketch of personhood in time and place; and, the sketch is enacted within
a participation framework (2007:321). Both performatively and narratively, KSP
participants create, populate, and forge relations between spatio-temporal realms
(Lempert and Perrino, 2007:206). Joint reference builds chronotopes.
The foundation of any participation framework is shared presupposition. Everyone
has to (1) know what frame they are supposed to be operating in and (2) agree to do
so. Frames compete, though, in nearly every interaction. For example, the September
2007 Bard-Klub Midwest campout included a disco after the main Saturday
night performance. This was an opportunity for performers to play contemporary
Russian rock and for people to dance to more upbeat music than the slower, longer
samodeiatelnaia pesnia repertoire. Though Soviet-era references constituted much
of the shared knowledge base among the immigrants, most people also listened to
54
Russian radio, watched Russian satellite TV and frequented Russian restaurantsall

places where the latest Russian hits are played. Even the disco, however, which featured
post-Soviet songs, was marked by someone shouting from the crowd, Everybody
dance! (Tantsuiut vse!), which is a well-known line from the Brezhnev-era film Ivan
Vasilevich Changes Profession (Ivan Vasilevich meniaet professiiu) (Gaidai, 1973).
Chronotopes abut, eclipse and overlap each other (Bakhtin, 2004:252). I dont
attempt to classify characteristics of the Soviet chronotope, but rather outline how
representations of Soviet space-time signal evaluative stances towards the past. And
those evaluations do vary. While the Soviet regime ran millions of people through
the same educational, institutional and ideological structures, they did not turn into
a monolithic mass: Homo sovieticus robots. Those who grew up in the USSR share
a common symbolic vocabulary, though, even if Soviet immigrants and present-day
residents of Russia incorporate historical images into different narratives of identity.
At the sleti, essentialized categories of Russian and American served as
foils against which conceptions of immigrant personhood were constructed. Max
and Vasilii repeatedly stressed the superiority of KSP experience over any similar
American activities. They insisted that Russians really camp, while Americans use
trailers. Russians really play the guitar; Americans just sing dull songs. Russians really
go out into the woods; Americans pay someone for a commercialized substitute (even
though these campouts took place in fee-based state parks). Max and Vasilii collapsed
Russian and Soviet categories in opposition to American. Additionally, Vasilii
maintained that KSP has Russian roots, just like under Brezhnev, arguing that
Americans can always do barbecuing in the park or whatever. This is different. This
goes back to Russian tradition, like in pioneer camps. Vasilii tied essential differences
between American and Russian camping to his understanding of state-sponsored
Young Pioneer camping trips (which he never attended), linking the authenticity of
KSP experience to an imagined Soviet time and place. His use of here, when he
said people go camping here, indexed the United States. Here was contrasted
to there, or the Soviet Union. He also maintained that people go to KSP in search
of something that may not exist there anymore, and certainly doesnt exist here
(interview with author, September 16, 2007). In other words, people go to KSP, at
least in part, in search of a Soviet phantom.
Vasilii drew discursive boundaries between these two idealized groups, mapping
essential qualities about types of people onto discourses about the authenticity of
given songs. America is thus associated with the commercial in land use and music.
By extension, then, both Soviet camping and music are portrayed as being more
authentic. Though he expressed nostalgia for state-run Pioneer camps, Vasilii took
pains to disassociate himself from Communists. When I asked him whether songs
that had been sung at KSP were Soviet, he quickly corrected me: Soviet-era. But
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Amy Garey
theyre not necessarily Communist songs. In the segment below, Ivan also describes
an ideal of Soviet personhood linked to Soviet times but explicitly detached from the
Soviet state: 9
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AG:
Ivan:
AG:
Ivan:
AG:
Ivan:
In spite my living in this country

I think of myself as a Homo sovieticus
[Uh so]
[Okay]
So
Yeah
So
You know
and its kind of hard
its a little difficult to explain
Its um
By Soviet I dont mean the Communists
I mean the time when we grew up
Uh huh
Um
It was during, you know
It was kind of you get used to certain
Certain things
Um going camping
You know getting away I guess
Maybe [unintelligible]
Its psychological
You know getting away from being under a watchful eye
Going to a forest
Singing some songs
Just
Having
Letting your soul run free I guess (interview with author,
April 29, 2007).10
Ivan used Homo sovieticus here to signal that he supported Soviet ideals, but
stripped the phrase of its political implications. Sociologist and migr Aleksandr
Zinoviev (1985) deployed the term Homo sovieticus to highlight stereotypical,
generally negative characteristics of Soviets, but his apparent criticism of Soviet
shiftlessness was tempered by the superior position he placed Soviets vis--vis
Westerners. Ivans use of the term here was not intended to be ironic, but rather
56
to affiliate with a highly propagandized vision of the New Soviet Man. Then,
though, he distanced Sovietness from Communists and the watchful eye of
the state (lines 12 and 23). He thus opposed a political order to the chronotope of
Soviet-style sociality enacted at the campouts. Though Ivans narrative referenced
Soviet personhood, he reproduced post-Soviet immigrant personhood. No one
can have Soviet personhood any longer. People can only use Soviet norms to
inform present behavior.
But it wasnt just what Ivan said that set Soviets apart from Communists. It
was how he said it. He achieved these contrasts through parallel stress and pitch
contours (lines 12-13).11 The rhythm and interactional implication of, By Soviet
I dont mean the Communists. I mean the time, is different from By Soviet
I dont mean the Communists, I mean the time In the first statement, Soviet,
Communists and time are clearly linked. In the second they are not. People draw
on prosodypitch, loudness and timingin order to make interactional points as
much as they use vocabulary. Words are like the brushstrokes of a conversational
painting: essential, but meaningless without depth, color and texture. Poetic
strategies such as repetition, contrast and pitch-matching add rhetorical force and
cue how the text should be interpreted. And prosody can even trump denotation.
For example, the interactional implication of Yeah, thats a good idea, when
voiced sarcastically, is the opposite of its denotational meaning. A transcript tells
only a fraction of the story. Presenting interlocutors comments in intonation
units visually displays the mechanics of stance-taking, illustrating how concepts
point to each other and how such assemblages contribute to meaning-making (cf.
Shoaps, 1999, 2009).12
Jakobson termed such structural aspects of discourse poetic functions, as
opposed to strictly literal interpretations (1960:358359). In the example below,
Max relies on the pattern of his utterances to compare samodeiatelnaia pesnia
to American folk music, which he portrayed as commercialized and insincere:
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Yeah and Bob Dylan you

You know
As soon as you say
For me at least
I dont know
I-its
Its definitely going to be wrong for the
Totally different type
For me Bob,
Bob Dylan means America
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Amy Garey
11
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14
Means capitalism
Means
<VOX> Oh wait a sec
You know thats<VOX>
15 You got everything already in there (interview with author, March 21, 2007).
Max equates Bob Dylan with America, and both with capitalism, by repeating
analogically associated concepts after the word means (lines 1011).
Everything already in there (line 15) refers to aspects of American music
which Max considers contrary to the spirit of samodeiatelnaia pesnia. Marked
intonation in lines 1314, signaled by a dip in pitch and slower pace, indicates that
he spoke, sarcastically, as someone else. Max voices an imagined third party in
order to make the point that American folk music comes less from the heart than
samodeiatelnaia pesnia.13 Such idealization of Soviet authenticity is reminiscent
of sentiments expressed elsewhere. Maria Todorova observed that, across the
Soviet bloc, There is also the feeling of loss for a very specific form of sociability,
and of vulgarization of the cultural life (2010:7). For Max, the vulgarization of
music resulted from a profit motive. Samodeiatelnaia pesnia stands outside that.
In the US., KSP is a-corporate in the same way that it was a-state in the USSR.
Explaining the appeal of sleti, Morris Sinelnikov claimed that official Soviet
songs did not lay on the soul (lezhat na dushu) like samodeiatelnaia pesnia
did (interview with author, July 12, 2007). As another mass-produced, pre-vetted
product, Max makes a similar argument about American folk music.
Ivan connected concepts with pitch and stress; Max did it rhythmically.
These prosodic accents helped shape distinct, sometimes intersecting, axes of
differentiation: here/there; now/then; private/public; commercial/authentic;
Russian/Communist. An overall Russian/American dichotomy regiments these
concepts, though, illustrating Susan Gals observation that a central semiotic
opposition can anchor concurrent axes of differentiation (2005). Russian
becomes associated with public and authentic, while private and
commercial characteristics are attributed to Americans. Ideals of post-Soviet
personhood were forged in the interstices of these oppositions. At KSP, people are
neither here (America) nor there (the Soviet Union) and are neither Americans
nor Soviets. The space of Russianness is not created solely through a Russian/
American binary, but is instead part of a three-term contrast set: Americans,
Russians and Communists. Campouts are thus liminal spaces, their space-time
defined almost more by what they are not than what they are. Soviet chronotopes
are constructed, though often without longing. America is represented, but from
the point of view of outsiders. KSP stands suspended between these two cultural
58
worlds.
Some performers capitalized on this liminality to poke fun at Soviets and
Americans at the same time. Profiting from such multi-layered punning, one
singer performed an English translation of the Russian folk song Kalinka, a
tune many may recognize as in the same genre as the theme song to the video
game Tetris.14 It is a joke that drew on Soviet references, but the parodys
success depended on having a bilingual audience who could immediately backtranslate the lyrics into Russian, remember the original song and laugh at the
disconnect between the two versions. The performance was especially humorous
to an immigrant audience because the singer exaggerated his Russian accent. The
jokes butt was not Russians, though, especially since the audience probably
hears heavier accents all the time. It was not funny because of pronunciation, but
because it spoofed the Boris-and-Natasha-style essentializations amerikantsii
make.
The same singer also performed a version of the hit 1953 song So Many
Golden Lights (Ognei tak mnogo zolotykh), which tells the story of a woman
in love with a married man (in Gillespie, 2003:482):
There are so many golden lights
On the streets of Saratov
There are so many bachelor boys,
But I love a boy whos married.
Ognei tak mnogo zolotykh

Na ulitsakh Saratova
Parnei tak mnogo kholostikh
A ia liubliu zhenatogo.
The performer parodied the lyrics by translating them into English and substituting
the character of the woman with a homosexual man:
Theres so many nice homosexual boys
But I love a hetero
Theres so many niiice homosexual boys here
But Im in love with a hetero.
Additional comedic effect came from the fact that this song played on the
(presumed) contrast between heterosexual men in the audience and homosexuals
in the lyrics. The singers improvisational use of the deictic here (Theres so
many nice homosexual boys here), which is not in the original Russian version,
draws the audience into the performative space. Just translating the lyrics into
English, in this case, may not have been enough to render the song funny. The
original, almost sacred, lyrics of these songs in the popular Soviet canon were
turned on their heads by transposing them into an unexpected context.
The double- or triple-voicing of parody results in a comedic Venn diagram;
punch lines occur at the intersection of indexical valences. And they draw on
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several different symbolic universeseach itself a chronotopein order to

execute the joke. Ironic voicing demonstrates how political systems can be
critiqued via their own propagandistic codes. It simultaneously lampoons Soviet
ideology and reinforces the importance of Soviet-era references in this community
of imaginers.
Its not just the words: Affect and index

At home my father and mother wait for me
My Phantom was blown up quickly
In the clear blue sky
I wont see them anymore (Phantom, Soviet-era folk song; author unknown).15
After the guitarist finished singing the above stanza, a grey-haired, teary-eyed
man stood up and thanked him. He explained that he had listened to that song
with army friends in Siberia, then told a tale of swimming to shore in freezing
water, barely surviving, with those same comrades when the motor on their boat
broke. The crowd listened, captivated. We were enthralled less by the drama of
the mans stories, which rambled, than by his display of emotion. But the most
palpable feeling emerging from that interaction was the sense that we, a group
of about thirty people huddled around a campfire, were linked to each other
through his stories. Gazes, nods and sighs communicated that we were sharing a
reaction; understanding bound us. Events often create emotional responses, but
semiotic triggers for such feelings vary. A song such as Phantom both indexes
its historical genesis and comments on the context in which it is invoked. As AbuLughod and Lutz observe, emotion is about social life rather than internal states
(1990:12). While feelings are personal, discourses of emotion are also ways
of managing interpersonal relations and, through these interactions, of defining
concepts of the community. Nostalgia is, thus, a response to cultural signifiers
situated within a field of ever-changing conditions.
Just as people watch sentimental films to be moved, visit haunted houses to feel
fear or race cars for the adrenaline, many enjoy KSP because they have a rare
opportunity to revel in group nostalgia. Max describes the pursuit of emotional
experience through song as one of the main reasons to attend campouts. He
claims that there is something unique to the group experience not captured by
either playing CDs or attending concerts, even if the song lyrics have personal
significance for him:
1
I mean
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and in bard music

theres one thing that where you listen to a CD,
theres one thing where you go to a concert,
and then theres where you sit around at a campfire
or in the living room in this kind of
group of people where
you read everyones emotions.
You know,
you can see everybodys eyes.
You can,
you know,
hear them sing or hum or,
you know,
sing in their heads or something.
This whole kind of,
you know,
group environment.
In this group experience.
And its the music,
its the words,
its
for people who,
you know,
its the lyrics.
Its,
and its also just this kind of
I mean
I guess that sounds a little bit crazy and metaphysical
But this whole emotional experience where people feel each other.
Its not just the words (interview with author, March 21, 2007).
Participants often represented nostalgic experience at KSP as something uniquely

available to immigrants. Max claimed that American music was incapable of
triggering intense, affective, nostalgic responses around campfires because of
the commercial motive underlying its circulation. Likewise, Ivan held that the
type of nostalgic experiences people have at KSP cannot be replicated in an
American context because Americans dont understand suffering: This kind of
bard music comes from some sort of pain. Some sort of oppressionwhich in
the United States literally does not exist (interview with author, April 29, 2007).
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In his analysis of Ostalgie, or nostalgia for East Germany, Martin Blum observed
nostalgic discourses serving comparable exclusionary purposes. His research
shows that knowledge of East German products is used to mark boundaries
between (former) East and West Germans (Blum, 2000). Similarly, Soviet-era
pop cultural competence cordons off a space for the articulation of Russianness.
In order to understand how a sense of group identity is constructed at and
through KSP campouts, we must consider two levels of triggering events and,
consequently, two types of affective response. First, many people have personal
associations with the songs. Phantom, mentioned above, summoned highly
specific, emotion-laden memories for the Soviet army veteran. Though everyones
associations are different, people often narrate their connection to each other in
terms of mutual emotion. Nodding, smiling and singing in unison then become
paralinguistic signals through which people renew their ties to each other. The
recognition that people share similar experiences and presuppositions about the
meanings of lyrics leads to a second level of affective experience, or what Max
calls feeling each other. Understanding that everyone is having the first level
of emotional engagement with the songs produces a sense of group belonging.
These two types of emotional states correlate to orders of indexical association
(Hill, 2005). First-order indexicality denotes social categories. For example,
Jane Hill states that some Americans use of mock Spanishsuch as hasta la
banana or el truck-orelies on negative stereotypes of Spanish speakers. But
using these forms in conversation to appear laid back, funny or hip also indicates
something about the relationship between speakers in that interaction; this is
second-order indexicality (Hill, 2005; Silverstein, 2003). At KSP campouts, the
first indexical order invokes a Soviet symbolic universe, and the second references
interactions between participants in the speech event. Nonverbal communication,
such as singing and eye gaze, signal that people understand the first level of
reference: it is meta-commentary on the first, purely figurative one. Showing that
you know the words to songs demonstrates that you share knowledge with the
group, and the sense of belonging becomes itself emotionally charged.
As Max observed, its not just the words. Lyrics get infused with the emotional
power of nostalgic reflection, spurring effervescence at campouts that, when
represented afterwards, contributes to the reproduction of community in diaspora.
Emotion fosters a feeling of group solidarity at campouts themselves, but is
equally important in the stories people tell themselves and each other. Whether
moments of transcendental group solidarity actually materialize for all participants
is impossible to assess. But it is at least clear that it is important to some informants
to talk about the event in these terms.
People gather at KSP campouts to be moved, each in their own way. There
62
is enough overlap in peoples biographies and understandings, though, to build

solidarity. This feeling of groupness at KSP then becomes incorporated into
narratives about what it meant to be Sovietand what it means to be a Soviet
immigrantleading to a conception of community identity that transcends the
campout.
Something different, something of their own:

Genre, generation, conflict
One Soviet-era song sung several times over the course of the September 2006
festival was My Dear One (Milaia Moia), a romantic ballad first performed
by Yuri Vizbor at a 1973 slet in Samara. The lyrics are about lovers who meet at a
campout and are unsure when they will see each other again. Some people may have
sung this as students in the USSR and were simply reminiscing as they sang along.
Many age groups were represented at KSP, though, so this explanation is lacking. One
participant, Liuba, was only thirty years old, had never gone to KSP in Russia, and yet
knew all the words to My Dear One. Vasilii was 39 and had not been to a slet in the
Soviet Union, either, but he also sang along. He said he learned the words by going to
KSP events in the US. Thus, when people sing Soviet songs, they often cite a familiar
time and place even if they didnt sing those particular songs in their youth.
Interpretations of cultural references vary, even among people of the same
generation. So creating cohesion at an event where the performers are between 20 and
80 years old, where migrs left their home countries anywhere from weeks to decades
ago, and where some are too young to have had any direct experience with the Soviet
Union is, to say the least, a challenge. There are conflicts of representation within the
diasporic community because people have different understandings of what the Soviet
Union signified and different relationships to that past. While it is illustrative, we
should not attribute variations in knowledge about Soviet popular culture to young
and old generations, but to diverse experiences. People who are the same age may
have immigrated at different times and have varying levels of familiarity with Soviet
life, symbols and references. And even those who left the USSR as adults may not
have encountered KSP until coming to the United States. Ideas about appropriate
repertoire are linked to the presumed participation framework of the campouts. But
since people hold different assumptions about how KSP should be conducted, there is
active negotiation of appropriate behavior within the participation framework of KSP.
For example, one mans attempt to play Metallicas Enter Sandman was halted
by people sitting around himtwice. Playing a contemporary Western song violated
the sense of cohesion fostered by references to collectively held knowledge (since
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few people knew the words). Similarly, when a man in his twenties delivered an
impassioned performance of the 1989 song, Everything is Going According to
Plan (Vse idet po planu) by the punk group Grazhdanskaia Oboronaa song
which details leaders failures from the Soviet era through Gorbachevthe concert
organizers cut his microphone. Only our grandfather Lenin was a good leader. All the
other ones are such shit,16 the singer had belted out. Around fifteen twentysomethings
all but moshed along to the music. Their parents glowered.
It seems little has changed. Morris Sinelnikov framed part of his motivation for
participating in the samodeiatelnaia pesnia movement in terms of youthful rebellion:
1
Glavnoe chto ne byli sovietskie pesni.

It was most important that they were not Soviet songs.
Ofitsialnie takie.
Official-type.
Znaiete molodie liudi

You know, young people
oni vsegda hotiat

they always want
chto nibut drugoe

something different
chto nibut novoe

something new
chto nibut svoei

something of their own
chto nibut ne obychnoe.

something out of the ordinary (interview with author, July 12, 2007).
Max reported that the Solnyshko campout in Pennsylvania in August 2007 also
featured generational disconnect (interview with author, October 17, 2007). The
events website boasted, Where can you expect to see Pioneer inductions? In
America!17 The narrator for a video produced about the event says,
For us, former Pioneers of the Soviet Union, the red necktie always goes with
memories of the smell of baked potatoes. And even though I have an account
with an American bank and a townhouse mortgage, it doesnt hurt to sometimes
look in the mirror, smile and give the past a Pioneers salute.18
Though the video claims that Solnyshko was put on by people who still remembered,
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Max, who attended, said that at least half of the attendees were college students in their
twenties who had never been Pioneers themselves and may have had very limited memories
of life in the former Soviet Union at all. In the video, these young adults marched in a
parade, waved red Pioneer flags and sang the Hymn of the Pioneers of the Soviet Union19:
Soaring campfires light up dark nights
Vzveites kostrami, sinie nochi
We are Pioneers, children of the working class
My Pionierydeti rabochikh!
The era of brighter years is approaching
Blizitsia era svetlykh godov
The motto of the pioneers is always be ready!
Klich pionerovvsegda bydgotov!
While the college students had never been Young Pioneers, they fashioned new
meaning for Soviet practices. Even if KSP participants sit around the campfire singing
the same songs, Max said,
People have to understand that young people are doing something different.
Not like lets remember the good old times; more like lets hear some good music.
Lets sing some songs that we all know. And lets sing some songs that weve just
heard, too (interview with author, October 17, 2007).
Youth are creating something of their own, rendering KSP relevant to life in the United
States. This relevance, in turn, safeguards the festivals survival.
Conclusions: Semiotics of nostalgia

If ones personal memories are not necessary for nostalgia, the category explodes to
include Renaissance festivals and nostalgia for the future (Boym, 2001). Memory
offers a great conceptual brightline. Then affection for the Middle Ages or youthful
fascination with the 1950s can be termed antiquarian feeling or displaced
nostalgia (Davis, 1979:8; Wilson, 2005:32). We have no way, though, of knowing
what people remember. The problem is not that too many types of activities are
considered nostalgia, but rather that the term nostalgia simultaneously refers to
individual emotion, sociological data and the theoretical framework used to interpret
those data. If we took Renato Rosaldos (1989) analysis of rage as an example, this
would be like calling a grieving husbands fury, collective headhunting practice and
the anthropological concepts used to describe those activities anger. Nostalgia is
overtaxed. Nostalgia, like anger, is an emotion. It circulates, though, in representations.
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The data about such emotions that social scientists have access to are observable
social practices.
Because of these limitations, scholars have moved to locate the objects of nostalgia
not in the past itself, but in public depictions of it (Bissell, 2005; Boym, 2001; Ivy,
1995; Nadkarni and Shevchenko, 2004; Oushakine, 2007; Wilson, 2005). Anyone
can voice nostalgia for chronotopes, even for pasts never experienced or futures not
yet realized. It is also essential, though, to differentiate between mental and material
symbolic phenomena. This is the advantage of a semiotic view: it allows us to
separate out not only signified from signifier, but both signifier and signified from the
cognitive processes used to interpret them (cf. Garey, 2012). Peirces three-pronged
sign, lucidly defined by Richard Parmentier, provides the conceptual hooks on which
to hang analysis of nostalgic practice:
Fundamental to a Peircean view of signs, linguistic or otherwise, is the notion
that three elements need to be kept in sight at all times: (1) the quality of the
expressive semiotic vehicle (what he calls the Sign), (2) some aspect of physical,
social or psychological reality brought into play by these means (what he calls
the Object), and (3) the semiotically-determined state of affairs that results from
and objectifies the interplay of Signs and Objects (what he calls the Interpretant)
(2007: 273).
For example, a semiotic vehicle would be the material shape of the hammer and
sickle; the object would be what that image represents; and the interpretant would be
what it means or how it affects the viewer. Most of the studies listed above classify
nostalgia according to differences in the interpretant. Semiotic vehicles, such as the
red neckties of Young Pioneers, are constant whether they are donned as camp humor
or contemplative reminiscence. The represented objects, too, are largely the same.
What is variable is how people relate to those symbols (the interpretant). Differences
in attitude, not practice, are what separate restorative and reflective nostalgia, Davis
orders of nostalgia, and modern versus postmodern nostalgia (Boym, 2001; Davis,
1979; Nadkarni, 2007). There is utility to classifying types of nostalgia, just as
psychologists distinguish between anger, hostility and aggression (Belgum, 1987).
Hewing to a semiotic approach, however, acknowledges private aspects of nostalgic
experience without relying on them for social scientific explication.
While KSP is a festival of reminiscing, participants are not just aping Soviet
canonical songs. Each persons voicing of a Soviet chronotope is a slightly different
representation. (Post-)Soviet immigrants use the symbolic resources of a Soviet social
imaginary to construct ideals of personhood, but the significance of these references
must be interpreted in the context of their American contextualizations. Nostalgia is
not just a looking back, and more even than a way of interpreting the present: it is a
66
mechanism for reproducing tradition. KSP participants voice narratives of continuity,

not irrevocable loss. The sometimes awkward and often conflicting alignments
described here represent nostalgia in-the-makinga nostalgia dependent on sociality
as much as memory.
KSP campouts in the midwest are festivals of contradictions: of non-Russian
Russians; of ex-Soviets brandishing Soviet symbols; of young people nostalgic for
their parents pasts. At KSP, people enact, animate and (re)create Soviet sociality.
These festivals point to the context-specific ways in which a symbolic order is read, as
well as to how the meanings of social signifiers are negotiated interactionally. Is KSP
tradition? Is it nostalgia? Is it kitsch? Like reflections in a warped mirror, the answer
shifts with where you stand.
NOTES
1
This essay would not have been possible without the generosity of people in the
Chicago Russian-speaking community who shared their homes, tents, songs and stories
with me. These interlocutors commented onand quarreled withmy interpretations,
and had a hand in not only providing material for the paper, but in informing analysis
of it. I also owe deep intellectual debts to professors, colleagues and friends at the
University of Chicago and the University of Texas. Thanks, particularly, to Robert Bird
for his considered and thorough feedback and to Robert Blunt, Kevin Caffrey, Brian
Horne, Dionisios Kavadias and members of the University of Chicago Anthropology
of Europe workshop for suggestions on earlier drafts.
See also Svetlana Boyms (2001:xii) discussion of nostalgia directed at massmediated images, such as for dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
This analysis supports Serguei Oushakines (2007) argument that not all
representations of Soviet signifiers endorse a socialist political order. But while
Oushakine intentionally excludes performative aspects of re-signification to draw
attention to pictorial examples, I take them up explicitly.
Most interviews were conducted in English. I translated quotations from those that
were in Russian. Conversations at KSP were almost exclusively in Russian. Unless
otherwise indicated, translations of textual Russian material are mine as well.
Slet is a term which comes from the verb sletatsia, to gather or congregate, often used
to refer to flocks of birds (Morris Sinelnikov, interview with author, July 12, 2007).
Mr. Sinelnikov stated that he would prefer to be cited by name rather than with a
67
Amy Garey
pseudonym. All other interlocutors names have been changed.

7
A recent American example supports the idea that event participants do not
necessarily affiliate with the political goals of institutional organizers. Live Earth
concerts were staged worldwide in July 2007 to raise awareness of global warming.
But one media description of the concerts noted that the activist goals of the concert
were very grand and high-minded, but yesterday afternoon, outside Giants Stadium,
it was all about tailgating and beer pong (Weekend Edition Sunday, 2007).
Song from the popular film, Ironiia sudby, ili s legkym parom! (Riazanov and
Petrov, 1975).
Each line in the transcript represents an intonation unit, which is a psychologically

salient chunk of discourse (Chafe, 1994:5759). Breaks between intonation units
usually occur when a breath is taken or speech is slowed down, often at the end of a
phrase (Du Bois, 1992).
10
Transcription conventions:
En dash (-)
Truncated word
Em dash ()
Truncated intonation unit
Italics
Emphasis
Brackets [ ]
Overlapping speech
<VOX>
Marked prosody
11
There are high pitch accents on the words Soviet, Communists and time. See
Wennerstrom (2001), Chapter 2, for further explanation of how pitch accents can set
up contrasts between words or concepts.
12
In this article, I only transcribe natural speech in intonation units. Quotes from songs
and movies are presented as block quotations.
13
Some musicians would disagree with Max. The lead singer of the Russian rock
band Akvarium, Boris Grebenshchikov, maintains that Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie
and Leadbelly were the leaders of an American avtorskaia pesnia tradition. KSP
USA, June 2006, http://www.aquarium.ru/misc/aerostat/aerostat59.html, accessed
November 1, 2007.
14
Donna Buchanan (2010) describes how the tune to Kalinka was redeployed in
satiric Bulgarian performances.
15
The song tells the story of an American F-4 Phantom fighter pilot who is shot down
by a Soviet during the Vietnam War.
16
Odin lish dedushka Lenin horoshii byl vozhd/A vse drugie ostalnie takoe govno.
Grazhdanskaia Oborona, http://www.gr-oborona.ru/texts/ 1056899068.html,
accessed September 18, 2007.
68
17
The website of the Solnyshko event is http://www.festival-x.org/, accessed January

18, 2007.
18
No u nas, bivsheikh pioneerov sovetskogo souyza, krasnie galstuki vsegda ostanutsia

v pamiati vmeste c zapakhom pichenoi kartoshki. I dazhe chet v amerikanskom
banke i kredit na taunhaus, ne meshaet inogda posmotret v zerkalo, ulibnutsia i
otdat proshlomu pioneerskii saliut.
19
Video report available at http://www.tusovo.com/article.php3?id_article=1746,

accessed October 30, 2007.
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72

JULIA CREET
ABSTRACT
This essay explores the relations of center and periphery with respect to secondgeneration memory of the Holocaust. Arguing against the idea that first-generation
memory is immutable and the center to which all other generation memories are
peripheral, I propose a loosening of filial ties in favor of the supplementary functions
of microhistory. Exploring creative genres, rather than an adherence to the accuracy of
memory, may be a manner of engagement that allows us to reconfigure the destructive
forces of never forget.
Introduction
The question of marginality or being peripheral to memory has troubled me perhaps
more than anything else over the years. It amounts to one question really: How does
one remember something that was latently but manifestly not ones own?
At the time I wrote this article, I was in Washington, DC, at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) finishing The Unread Novel, a collaborative
memoir, literary genealogy and microhistory of the Gyrgy family of Szkesfehrvr,
Hungary. This was a family of integrated1 Hungarians of the Izraelite faith whose
lives and community were utterly destroyed by the deportations of June 1944. I
am a Canadian Protestant child of a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor who
converted and disavowed her past. This essay itself is at once peripheral and central
to the problem of my projecta family memoir based on a wealth of manuscripts
and archival sources, but no direct oral transmission. My book is drawn from two
Julia Creet
sets of primary materials, mostly from my mothers autobiographical fictions and my

grandfathers archive, and now the seemingly infinite holdings of the USHMM, the
online records of the International Tracing Service, Yad Vashem, the Wiener Library
in London, the Shoah Foundation, and as-yet-undiscovered seas of archival sands.
As I search for the personal in the historical, I negotiate constantly moving centers
and margins of testimony and fiction, of history and memory, of macro and micro,
of lunivers concentrationnaire and the Gyrgy family, of Jewish and Protestant
cultures. Individuals and families are subject to the central events, yet are by definition
marginal to history and, increasingly, to first-hand memory.
Memory studies, as a discipline, emerged alongside the resurgence and death of
personal memories of Holocaust survivors that garnered belated attention in the 1980s
primarily in Europe,2 North America and Israel.3 In each geopolitical context, the
political and contested uses of the memories were quite different, but since then, the
event itself has circulated worldwide, as Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2002) have
argued, as cosmopolitan memory. Questions, then, of to whom Holocaust memory
belongs, who remembers what, for what reason and how these memories are evoked
over time and generations are paramount to understanding how it is that we manipulate
the malleability of memory and its potential for violent political deployment. Never
again is the justification for Israels slaughter of threatening Palestinians and, at the
same time, the protest against it: We should never let this happen again to others.
The aggressively defensive and the moral both seem to draw from the same lessons of
memory and history. Indeed, one of the early observers of this phenomenon, Yehuda
Elkana, called on Israel to forget:
Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of
this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to
creating our future and not to be preoccupied from morning to night with symbols,
ceremonies and lessons of the Holocaust. They must uproot the domination of
that historical remember! over our lives (Elkana, 1988).
So, we are a generation caught between remembering and forgetting, where both take
an active decision. How might we negotiate these positions, possibly decentering
both? As a child of someone who chose to forget and as a researcher who has actively
worked to remember, I know memory is a place we can study for the tensions of
center and margins, first, second and thirdness, aggression and victimization, that
reverberate whenever anyone claims ownership of an inherited traumatic past.
In the absence of oral transmission, my reconstruction of family memory has been
built from two archival caches. My grandfather, Oszkr Gyrgy (born Grossman), was
a Hungarian poet and translator whose papers ended up in the Fejr County Archive in
1956 twelve years after his deportation and death. He was destroyed, but his ephemera
74
was preserved in perpetuity. I know him only through his literary and documentary
traces and have created a useable image of him wholesale through a largely (to me)
inaccessible language. I was drawn to the rocky shoals of this project by the siren
call of my mothers opaque memoirs (in which she obscured all identifying contexts)
combined with my grandfathers unreadable archive, never quite feeling that the
story was mine to tell. Yet, this history, in its retroactive reconstruction, is one that I
now understand shaped my life, though never consciously. I have been peripheral to
something centrally important about my mother and my childhood that can only ever
be recognized belatedly. Belonging to the second generation (are all generations
to be measured now by concentric circles rippling out from the sinking stone of the
event?), I am taunted by Pierre Noras claim that none of what I write has anything
to do with memory, but is, rather, history masquerading as memorial practice. Can one
exhume what has been buried or unconsciously experienced as anything but history?
Emotional continuity, even if ruptured or torn, is the hallmark of memory; history
thrives on the objective distance of discontinuity.
Yet, the idea of memory implies centrality, first-hand experience expressed in
direct testimonial fashion. In the contexts of these shifting margins and centers, my
particular project has its own peripheral anxieties that are worth exploring in some
detail. Those anxieties play out over a series of overlapping, rippling questions about
story-telling, quasi-Jewish inheritance, postmemory, microhistory and violence. We
may think that being unfaithful to memory is a form of violence; however, it is also
true that memorys demands for fidelity and fealty also enact violence.
Allow me here to further reflect on my introduction to Memory and Migration:
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (Creet and Kitzmann, 2011) on
the natural motility of memory and the anxieties that mobility causes for identity,
particularly ones built on reclaimed or inherited memory. There, I asked what would
happen if we studied not just the content of memory, but also its mechanisms, as if
memory were the stuff of dreamslinking conscious memory with its unconscious
doppelganger, its displacements, distortions, losses, projections and so onas of
consequence to the content itself. We have indeed taken this path with respect to
national memories. We understand the concept of selective, mobile and contested
memory well with respect to politics, in all of its negative connotations,4 but perhaps
less well in the context of historically and emotionally mobile personal or familial
memories, their reconstructions and their unconsciousness mechanisms.
As I argued, mobility does not mean that the content of memory becomes secondary,
but rather that the content is not sacred. If we separate the idea of originor to keep
with the themes of this issue of Hagar, the idea of periphery and centerfrom the
authenticity of memory,
75
Julia Creet
we can show that the manner in which memory travels is a quality of memory
itself, not a flaw, not a lessening, not a shift in category, but constitutional, of
memory, a constant constantly on the move, archiving itself rhizomatically (Creet
and Kitzmann, 2011:6).
Memory is, I argued, where we have arrived rather than where we have left (Creet
and Kitzmann, 2011:6). What then of second-generation or postmemory in this
respect?
Identity is inherently a product of memory. One must remember oneself as
something or someone in order to be that thing. As much as Judaism is a tradition
of memory, it is also a history of forgetting, of assimilation, of destruction, of
aggression, of disavowal, of rediscovery. Caesurae, erasures, lacunae and silences,
the interruptions of Jewish memory as a traumatic mark of the Holocaust that
must be overcome, have characterized much of the discourse of second-generation
memory. I have been troubled by this discontinuity more than most, given my late
apperception of being Jewish and an unwitting child of a terrible history. I have
struggled with the necessity (for me, but not so much my siblings) of reconstructing
this hidden but inherited past, the legitimacy of my encounter with this history and
this increasingly fraught identity. How does one deal with memory and a present
manifestly not and yet ones own? This anxiety is one that stems precisely from the
idea that memory is a fixed quantity and quality, that legitimacy and responsibility
adhere to the source of origin, even if that origin is obscured. If memory is a creature
of the present, invoked by very present needs, as much as it is an incorporation of the
past, then how do we negotiate these tricky relations between center and periphery
with respect to the memory of the Holocaust and its generations? In this essay I will
explore, albeit briefly, the nature of these anxious mobile memories of a disinherited
second generation through untold stories, (non)identity, postmemory, and the
historiographical performance of microhistory.
On being Jewish and not

People always ask: How did you find out you were Jewish? The idea of a hidden
Jewish past once seemed exotic, but not so much any more. There have been some
very famous examplesTom Stoppard, Madeline Albrightand, less spectacularly,
for Hungarians in particular, some very common stories. One of the first sources
Kovcs, and Katalin Lvai, Hogyanjttemr, hogyzsidvagyok? [How did I find
out that I am Jewish?] (Levai, Kovcs, and Ers, 1985), drawn from a series of indepth research interviews with Hungarians born shortly after WWII. I read it and
76
was both comforted and discomfited that my experience was not so singular as I
thought.5
born in Hungary after the Holocaust had no idea that they were Jewish until they
were teenagers or adults, and the information came as a dramatic revelation, often
from someone outside the family as a taunt. This pattern held true for Hungarians
abroad (I have met many others), stemming not from post-war, Communist-enforced
heterogeneity, but from dis-identification with the segregating designation of Zsid,
a racial category created by the Hungarian state, and the shame of being so brutally
expelled from a nation to which they were deeply attached. Not surprisingly, the
indirect manner in which this second generation discovered the secret of their
origins disturbed and charged what would have been an already complex relationship
to their Judaism. As the authors surmised, silence on the question of being Jewish
could mean for the child a conscious negation of its origins even if he or she was
intimate with the evidence, or a family rejection that involved the evacuation of
all lived collective memory and the whole history of the family, which nonetheless
surfaced in unconscious fashion, particularly, for one interviewee, in dreams (Levai,
Kovcs, and Ers, 1985:64).
In another of my touchstone articles, Nadine Fresco, a French historian, and
again one of the early writers on the consequences of being peripheral to hidden
memory, writes in Remembering the unknown:
Born after the war, because of the war, the Jews I am speaking of here feel
their existence as a kind of exile, not from a place in the present or future, but
from a time, now gone forever, which would have been that of identity itself
(1984:421).
The point these researchers emphasize is that belated knowledge of ones Jewishness
does not give one direct or easy access to that identity or its complicated history.
One must grapple with both conscious and unconscious knowledge, acceptance and
denial, and then still negotiate the chasms of memory and history, and the aggressions
derived from both the disavowal and avowal of a memory of victimization.
My experience of finding out was akin to hearing a family rumor, which I did
not quite believe at first and then found so utterly bewildering I put it away until
all chance of addressing it directly was gone. The investigation of this inheritance
has necessarily been a secondary and interpretative affair, where each mode of
engagement and inquiry has allowed me to reincorporate and integrate things both
unknown and familiar. I have come to understand the process as a literary genealogy,
at once fictional, esthetic and historical, an enactment of the processes of memory
itself. Let me begin with a second-generation, first-hand memory, the opening
paragraphs of the book that will be The Unread Novel:
77
Julia Creet
I used to hear my mother typing through the wall between our bedrooms, her red
nails adding a staccato to the flurries of mechanical punches. On my twentieth
birthday, she gave me a manuscript, by then a decade old, awkwardly titled A path
through puberty. You are old enough to read it now, she said, without telling
me what it was. I read it as autobiography, though it was clearly fictionalized. A
bittersweet childhood, a highly sexualized adolescence, a cultured family, petty
but long-remembered grudges, seduction at the summer cottage, and our narrator
finds herself marrying far too young and somewhat tragically. Though detailed
and evocative, the story was disjointed and lacked any sense of plot, development
or context, as if the motivation for the writer, and the reader, had been removed.
But the ending made the least sense to me. The protagonist, whom I assumed to
be my mother, married a man who was not my father and hinted at a child who
was not a sibling I knew. It confused me, and so I put it away.
I never asked my mother which parts were true, knowing that she wouldnt have
answered anyway. But I might also have willfully failed to understand. Fresco
observes: One pretends to pursue unrelentingly the reason for ones parents
silence, while, on the contrary, everything shows how much one avoids tearing
away the veil from the forbidden (1984:421). I must have sensed that the
factual accuracy of her memoir was of little consequence, that my mother was an
unreliable narrator and I an uninformed reader. She concealed far more than she
told, but I in turn understood far less than she wrote.
It all started with a secret and a document, as so many of these searches do. My mother
and I never talked about it; her memory died with her, though she left behind a
broad paper trail that I might have followed much earlier had the signposts not been
so contradictory. She contained her trauma by skirting around its edges, fictionally
revivifying her family while obfuscating the causes of their loss. Reading her
daybooks, annotated with notes that were never meant to be reminders to anyone but
her, I see now that we were surrounded by people who knew her in quite a different
context. Agnes, her sister, is in constant contact; Mrs. Neumann, her old Hungarian
friend, she of the poppy-seed cake at Christmas, was a regular visitor; letters come and
go monthly from dn, her uncle in Italy, her friend Zsuzsi Fabini in Budapest, her
cousin Dusi and Uncle Imre (who, it became clear after her death, was her first
husband). Imres sister, Baba Farkas, makes an appearance in Canada sometime
in the 1980s. We were marginalized from her past while she was in constant contact
with those who remembered her from another life entirely. She secured the world of
her private sadness by never teaching us a word of Hungarian, though she remained
deeply attached to its motifs and would cut out the stamps from her Hungarian mail
78
for us, monochromatic images of buses, streetcars, forklifts and square buildings,
monuments to socialist industry; and others, colorful athletes and heroes, flowers and
butterflies, remnants of a sentiment that had survived under Goulash Communism.
And we too were proud of her heritage and ours. But when people inevitably asked
when she had left Hungary, if she had left in 1956, I said yesand yet it was an
impossibility. My older sister Francesca had been born in London in 1950 and I was
old enough to do the math. In grade 5 or 6 I wrote a story about how my mother had
escaped by swimming up the Danube. It was my first attempt at inventing a usable
past. I wonder now what she made of it.
I struggle with owning what is the quintessentially Jewish memory of the twentieth
century from a perspective both central (I am second generation) and not; I have
only coded knowledge of that disavowed inheritance other than what I have come
to avow on my own, and no family transmission of either Jewish culture or trauma
other than what was oddly acted out and unspoken. I now know why she ate honey
and apples. I can only ever be peripheral to the (un)transmitted memory of
Judaism and the Holocaust even as it is the condition of my existence. Lets call it
shadow memory. I am W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz in his peregrinations, ellipses,
allusions, metaphors and displacements, a Protestant that can never be anything
but and a Jew who can never be anything but. To embrace either fully would be
to disavow the other. In this state, the margins feel more comfortable and genuine
than any central belonging. That said, I have access to one of the largest memory
banks in the world. Its hard to argue that any of us are peripheral to a history that
has been so well documented.
I have never had the feeling that Judaism takes kindly to marginal belonging, and
yet I am Jewish by definition and by obligation it seems. I am grateful for Jewish
generosity towards me. I have been welcomed as a prodigal granddaughter, instructed,
recruited and fed. I have had many first last suppers. I know that what or who
constitutes a Jew has been debated to no end for the purposes of establishing both
belonging and exclusion, and that the versions of being Jewish can be multiplied
by the number of Jews in the world at any given time. According to the Mishnah
and a contemporary fetishization of genetic genealogy, having a Jewish mother by
blood, if not by denomination, makes me a Jewreinforcing the notion of Jewishness
as a biological if not a cultural inheritance. Does that rule count for mothers who
disavowed their own Judaism? Would I want to be recognized as such? I am a
suspicious genealogist, suspicious of my own need to belong, even though I have
embraced my dubious inheritance as much as I can without committing myself to
something akin to a conversion process that would be alien to my secular soul. Having
no daughter to whom I could pass on this ambivalent blood, and indeed no nieces born
of our female line, I can only document the end of a line.
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The second (last) generation

Does being a product of the vagaries of survival give one direct access to that
formative event? We privilege degrees or generations of remove with the assumption
of some kind of direct or known transmission, even if necessarily a transmission of
ruptures and trauma. In a culture of shared memory, being Jewish is enough. One is
encouraged to assimilate the trauma: Kernels of stories can be expanded, missing
family members rediscovered, historical aggressions internalized.
Almost every well-known, second-generation microhistory or literary memoir
begins with what is known and tracks what is notArt Spiegelmans Maus, Daniel
Mendelsohns The Lost, Eva Hoffmans Lost in Translationwhile the absolute
unknown or imagined history treads the path of fiction or misdirection like Jonathan
Safran Foers Everything is Illuminated, David Grossmans See Under Love or W.
G. Sebalds Austerlitz. In the case of silence, looking at the past slant (Tell all the
truth but tell it slant/Success in circuit lies. Emily Dickinson) is the only option.
Deep memory,6 whether factual or not, is the dark beauty that dazzles. To engage
otherwise than esthetically would be at best disingenuous, even in the face of taunting
validation. Memory comes in fictional guise in the realm of silence. The best of its
fictional recreations come close to creating memory anew or at least mimicking
memorys circumlocutions so effectively that we care less about its mimetic relation to
event. Austerlitz, an adopted war orphan brought up Christian who forgets (or never
knew) that he was Jewish, is less a fiction to us than an embodiment of the uncanny
imbrications of the unknown, rediscovered and always was. We are remembered
by the things that remember us, recognizing in them vestigial implants, deliberately
hidden.
Austerlitz fantasizes about photographs that remember him, and Sebald invents for
Austerlitz an archetypical character Vera, who does indeed recognize him. I went
looking, as so many in my situation have, for old people who might remember what
had been destroyed. And I found my Vera (veritas) in Vera Roberts, a friend of my
mothers who had walked every step of the way with her on that terrible journey. As
we stood in the courtyard of a house on sz tca that had been part of the Jewish
ghetto of Szekesfehervarnow housing a marginalized Roma communityVera
counted people on her fingers: Your grandmother, great-grandmother, little Judit
and the two girls, Magda and Csppi [Agnes]. That was five. Local, collected
memory told me what my mother never did. They gave me photographs. I wanted
to hide her, your little sister, but your mother said Not yet, said Zsuzsi. I saw
your grandfather, leading his people out, said Tibor, making my broken grandfather
into Moses. I wasnt there, but my mother was. She saw what happened on the
platform at Auschwitz, said Gams, telling me yet another version of a heartbreaking
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moment. These were my photographs, these elderly people for whom my return came
as a strange surprise. They looked at me to see if they could recognize something of
someone they once knew; I craved their recognition, but knew it was only a name
that got me in the door. I commandeered their memories for my purposes, creating, in
effect, an oral transmission that I could then pass on to others in my family. Memory
stops and starts; transmission is nothing so direct. One can worm ones way back into
a photograph, into a story, into a memory. One can elicit memory and in the process
drop a new stone into the pond from which the ripples will emanate even as the stone
disappears.
If I have lapsed into figurative language here, this is no accident, for memory
is figurative, always worked on by the belatedness of trauma (belatedness is its
own trauma in this case), the processes of storage and the mechanisms of recall,
displacement, condensation and screen memories.7 Encoding, storage and retrieval
are the key operations of memory, which begs the question of the stability of the
thing to which we are peripheral in the first place. The reification of first-generation
memory, elevated as it is to the status of untouchable testimony, and justifying logics,
is what sets in motion our anxieties about misremembering and appropriation. Overidentification is a problem of over-valuating. We have placed ourselves at the margins
of memory by insisting on the unassailable firstness of our parents and grandparents
their journeys, and on the importance of their every detail. I looked for authenticity
in the memories of those who remembered and found instead rumors, justifications,
romanticizations and nostalgia, all elicited by me and my questions and my camera,
sixty years after the fact. True, I learned things, but I produced those memories and
their retellings are now mine. I set memory in motion once again.
Much has been written about the idea of inherited trauma, postmemory, secondhand experience, a continuity that defines us as a generation. In her recent
recapitulation of her influential idea, Marianne Hirsch writes that postmemory
describes the relationship that the generation after bears to the personal,
collective and cultural trauma of those who came beforeto experiences they
remember only by means of the stories, images and behaviors among which
they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and
affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right (2012:5).
Seem is a critical word for Hirsch, sensitive as she is to questions of appropriation
even with respect to inheritance. Yet, even though Hirsch recognizes that silence
was a common response to trauma, she elides, to some extent, the consequences
of memory inherited without content or context, where the manifestations can be
equally overwhelming, or perhaps even more so, without the seemingly direct access
to memory not ones own.
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The peripheral quality of disavowal is worth thinking about in the face of the
hypermnesiac impulses of Holocaust memory and scholarship as a whole. To
elucidate: We have reached the point of saturation with respect to memory of the
Holocaust in part because of the urgency that first-hand memory is at an end. The
reasons have been well rehearsed and justified, particularly the impulse to fill in all
the gaps in memory shot through with holes (Raczymow and Astro, 1994)and yet,
this impulse has produced its own margins. To enter the field of Holocaust memory,
one must engage the minutiae of the archive (with which I am all too familiar), leave
no detail unwritten, no memory unrecorded. I have written elsewhere about the death
drive in this fantasy of recording everything in one of its most appealing tales, Danilo
Ki The encyclopedia of the dead (Creet, 2002). Unlike Hirschs formulation that
we are overwhelmed by the memorys of others, what we do not know can drive us
differently in the sense the inherited unknown is a hidden self rather than a projection
or appropriation of the other. The urgent avowal of the last few decades, personal
and in much broader political spheres, may indeed be a reaction formation, not just a
corrective, against earlier disavowals, familial, national and historical.
Even as we adhere to a notion of trauma as an unconscious process, always
recognized or experienced belatedly, the idea of postmemory largely assumes
conscious inheritance and identification, even if its manifestations are not always
obvious. Our anxious need is to patch those holes, to fix memory in place, even as we
recognize the impossibility of such a task.
Hirsch offers a kind of prescription:
For postmemorial artists, the challenge is to define an esthetic based on a form
of identification and projection that can include the transmission of bodily
memory or trauma without leading to the self-wounding and retraumatizing that
is rememory (2012:86).
We must then, in Hirschs formulation, esthetically externalize what is internal,
inherited, but not first-hand, in order to illuminate and contain a mostly conscious overidentification with parental trauma. But, in the case of disavowals, secrets or remnants,
unspoken memory merges in the unconscious with dream material, surfacing through
its esthetic manifestations and research drives. We do not necessarily control the
esthetic process as a way of containing trauma, but sift through a hidden selfs esthetic
manifestations as a way of understanding its content, as we would in the process of
trying to understand a dream. For those who must generate the identification to begin
with, the process is rather like divination. Dreams estheticize unacceptable material,
longings, losses and aggressions that we cannot know or acknowledge consciously.
A silent parents trauma is rather like that: deep loneliness and rejection, untouchable
sadness never named, inexplicable cultural and sexual aggressions. Silent expressions
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are never straightforward, nor their inheritance intelligible. When people ask me what
I think are the consequences of growing up with a survivor, I dont have an answer. How
can one trace the consequences of something never articulated and never named? The
esthetic process then becomes one of discovery, as well as a structuring and containing
force. I read my intellectual interests as I would tea leaves, divining content from
disciplinary pulls, subject fascinations and generic experiments. My career has been
characterized by more mobility than most in my interests in historiography, literature,
queer theory, Holocaust studies and memory studies; and in expressive genres, in
history, literary criticism, translation, documentary film and literary nonfiction. It has
only been in retrospect that I have understood how each tropological turn in interest
and expression was driven by a need to engage in a mode of inquiry, a particular
mechanism of thought, incarnation and retrieval, as much as the content itself. One
tells a very different story in each genre and each genre accesses the unconscious and
its contents differently.
Memorial pursuits gain legitimacy by their story-telling merits, their narrative or
visual pleasures or displeasures. The creative brilliance of writers and artists who
have found ways of communicating absences, voids, traumas and gaps in tension
with intimate details, dates, names, places, acts, agencies, is a strategic response to
the feeling of being marginal to the past in both of its great embodiments, history
and memory. The memory of the Holocaust is nothing but postness, even for the
first generation itself, given the necessary belatedness of traumatic memory and
the reformulation of event and its meaning over the past 70 years. And we are all
peripheral to history in our individual specificity. While we might debate Adornos
dictum that poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric, a dictum refused in particular by
writers such as H. G. Adler (Adler, 1999), for the second generation, poiesis, in the
broadest sense of making, reconciles memory and matter. Our obsession with the
detail is our claim to the historical; imbedding it in creative forms, suspending any
easy relation to an actual past, is our mediation with the ghostly specters of memorial
inheritanceand disavowal, both a parents and ones own.
On microhistory and memory

Postmemory is by necessity on the margins of history, as it is on the margins of
memory. Obsession with details is the hallmark of absent memory; failure to ever find
enough, or enough proof, is the ultimate foil. Yet are these projects of rememoration
not essentially historical, as Pierre Nora has argued? Yes, they are. We are generating
history in a manner that is either supplementor centralto the aims of greater
historical projects, that is, to create knowledge that is generalizable. But the process
of doing so involves an intense engagement with historical details that have little
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significance in the larger historical sense and yet great significance in the processes of
working through inconsistences that point to parental inconsistency and our need for
absolute avowal. Whether a parent wore a yellow star or not in a particular photograph
taken in a very particular time and place, and why they do not remember doing so or
notthis is one of Hirschs pressing questionsdepends on knowing the significance
of a class of people who were marked in obvious and less obvious ways and in the
contemporary stakes of that marking. Why it matters is another question. A sense of
being marginal to memory demands that we place our parents in the most traumatic
of situationsthat we force them to remember, literally or esthetically, the things that
allow us to work through our own relation to inherited trauma. My anxious avowal
comes not so much from my mothers set of defenses, including conversion, lying
and hiding, as it does from trying to right my misrecognition. What I refused to see,
my own disavowal, is what I am working out through the accumulation and esthetic
arrangement of historical detail, (re)producing melancholia and unnamed loss as
conscious knowledge and feeling.
So let us then think about where history and memory come into contact at the
margins. Microhistory, the reconstruction of individual or familial sagas as a way of
telling a greater history, as families emblematic of their times, is a possible answer to
the dilemma of postmemory as history and appropriation. It solves the problem to the
extent that historically sound research can act as a supplement to memory. Here history
is a supplement in Derridian terms to memory, as something secondary to that comes
to serve as an aid to something original or natural. Strange to think perhaps of
history being the supplement to memory when, prior to the acceptance of microhistory
as a valid historiographical approach, memory was considered peripheral to or the raw
material of history. Peripheries and centers are always relationally unstable and are
capable of strangely inversing.
Memory is closer to figurative language born of passion, as Jacque Derrida reads
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and history is the linguistic fixing of the mobility of memory.
By dispelling the notion of origins, the origins of language, the origins of memory,
we move closer to understanding how it functions as a trace, but not an origin, in
the present. Historical recuperation is a reaction to dispersal. Memory, as I argued in
the introduction to Memory and Migration (Creet and Kitzmann, 2011), is dispersal,
always moving from an original that never existed in the first place. As Derrida writes:
for the essential predicate of the state of pure nature is dispersion; and culture is
always the effect of reconcilement, of proximity, of self-same [proper] presence
(1998:274). We use history, research, the archives, the seemingly inexhaustible
gathering of details to supplement memory, in effect to contain it, to keep it from
dissipating into nothingness. We define the margins of memory by history. Where
memory ends, history begins; through history we hope to reconstruct and reconstitute
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the origins of memory, producing signs that are only ever metaphors of absent origins.
So how then do we understand microhistory, that genre which seems to so closely
manifest our desires as we stand on the margins of memory and history?
One of my favorite writers on the subject of microhistory is Harvard historian Jill
Lepore. In an article that made me think deeply about my framing of my project,
Historians who love too much: Reflections on biography and microhistory, Lepore
(2001) sets out to answer the question of whether microhistorians have more or less
sympathy for their subjects than biographers. That question does not particularly
concern me here, but in the process of answering it, Lepore outlines four propositions
with respect to microhistory, one of which gives a clear and now almost standard
definition of this historiographic enterprise: however singular a persons life may be,
the value of examining it lies in how it serves as an allegory for the culture as a whole
(2001:141). Resolving small mysteries about a persons life, about their agency, we
create portals to larger cultural issues, yet the relationship is always metaphoricalan
allegory.
Microhistory lends itself to the family and to a kind of feminized memory, as Carlo
Ginzburg tells us about the work of Mexican historian Luiz Gonzlez:
To counteract the objections aroused by the word microhistory, he [Gonzlez]
suggested two alternatives: matria history, suitable for evoking that small, weak,
feminine, sentimental world of the mother which revolves around the family
and the village; or yin history, the Taoist term that recalls all that is feminine,
conservative, terrestrial, sweet, obscure and painful (1993:12).
Feminizing microhistory suggests (objectionably, perhaps, but quite accurately) its
minor status in the majoritarian, masculine world of history proper. Yet, historically,
we know Mnemosyne as prior to history, the mother (with Zeus) of the muse of
history Clio. Possessing Mnemosyne, according to Hesiod, legitimatizes authoritative
speech. Understanding history as the supplement of memory, then, where memory is
both prior to and the condition of history, places memory and its constant dissipation
at the forgotten center of history rather than at historys excluded margins. Accretion
and substitution are the undecidable modes of the supplement. Microhistory is then
an accretion to memory as it fleshes out the story and a substitution as it replaces pure
absence with presence, silence with writing, the ephemeral with that which can be
catalogued and taken for authoritative.
What Derrida makes clear is that the supplement is a thing in its own right. So we
who write microhistory as a way of engaging the myriad emotional, identificatory and
historical problems of postmemory are both adding to and supplanting an original. We
are writing and embodying something new. We are a surplus, a plenitude enriching
another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. We cumulate and accumulate
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presence. It is thus that art, techn, image, representation, convention, etc., come
as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function (Derrida,
1998:145). At the same time, as Derrida so elegantly holds aloft the contradiction:
But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates
itself in the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes
an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory [supplant]
and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes(the)-place [tient-lieu]. As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a
presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark
of an emptiness (1998:145).
If I have resorted to the language of literary theory to resolve a historiographic
question, it is because history and memory seem to exist as binary orders of thought
still, despite twenty years of debate that have paired them inseparably. Memory is
heavily used as a conduit of the historical; video testimony is a commonplace way of
making human scale the larger historical message of most Holocaust museums. Walls
of talking heads and photographs of the lost, the murdered, the tortured, the excluded
are the handmaidens of history, but still marginal and sentimentalized. What if history
is the supplement, the mark of emptiness that produces little relief? What if memory is
the imagined originary, only ever to be forgotten? Perhaps the future of understanding
the notion of postmemory is to give up entirely on the marginalizing division between
generations, between memory and history, and understand them to be always already
supplements to each other. In this manner we might also give up the valorization of
memory to which we can only position ourselves as peripheral and postand our
embrace of its violent manifestations in the present.
NOTES
1
Lszl Csosz, one of the authors of the recently-published The Holocaust In

Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide (Vgi, Kdr, and Csosz, 2013), argues that
there is a difference between integrated and assimilated, though assimilated
is the word we generally use. While assimilation suggests that a group gives up
all independent identification, taking on the host countrys language and cultural
and religious practices, integration describes a group who fully participates in the
cultural, political and business life of a nation but retains its own practices as well.
Cssz says that integration, rather than assimilation, is a more accurate concept to
86
describe the position of the Hungarian Jews in the twentieth century. These two
terms have their own resonances with respect to margins and center, treading not-sovisible lines between belonging and difference, which, as we well know, can become
unbridgeable fissures.
2
On the notion of contested memory in Europe, see, e.g., Assmann (2007); Dek,
Gross, and Judt (2000); Lamberti and Fortunati (2009); and Mithander, Sundholm,
and Velicu (2013).
The 1980s saw the Israeli school system embrace the memory of the Holocaust as
the generation of survivors began to die. For two chronologies of this shift and the
political context in which it took place, see Ofer (2013) and Resnik (2003).
We can look to Hungary as one of the prime examples at the moment where deflection,
distortion and forgetting allow the country to memorialize its status as a victim
of Germany, its Axis ally, at the very same time that the Hungarian bureaucracy
enthusiastically deported the majority of its Jewish population. At the other end of
the memorial spectrum, Israels instrumental use of the memory of victimization
to justify lopsided violence against Palestinians has made many Holocaust victims
question the legacy of never forget. See, for example, a letter published August 23,
2014, in the New York Times (as an advertisement) by forty Holocaust survivors who
condemned the Israeli assault on Gaza. As they argue, Never again must mean
NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!
The peripheries have their pleasures, as we know from other peripheral identities.
Marginality in queer and post-colonial discourses from the heydays of identity
politics provided important political perspectives on centrisms of every kind, giving
marginality cultural cache. As much as the margins demand recognition from the
center, much is lost in the process of moving toward sameness.
In her essay Days and Memory (2001), Charlotte Delbo distinguishes between two
kinds of memory, mmoire ordinaire and mmoire profonde, which Lawrence L.
Langer, in his introduction to Delbos trilogy Auschwitz and After, translates as
common memory and deep memory (Delbo, 1995:xi). Delbo writes:
Deep memory preserves sensations, physical imprints. It is the memory of the senses.
For it isnt words that are swollen with emotional charge. Otherwise, someone who
has been tortured by thirst for weeks on end could never again say Im thirsty. How
about a cup of tea (2001:xvi).
Deep memory could be triggered for Delbo by the smell of rotting potatoes, a
sensation that could never be put into words, while common memory was that which
could be articulated as history, as an event that had past. Obviously, deep memory
takes on an unconscious quality, a necessary forgetting that allowed survivors to
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function again the present. Deep memory, or sense memory (see Bojadzija-Dan,
2011), comes not as the memory of a historical event, but as an insistent present.
7
Belatedness is a core idea in trauma theory. Freud and subsequent observers

have grappled with the idea that, in the moment of fright, we cannot form a
coherent narrative of events. The psychoanalytical concept of afterwardsness
(Nachtrglichkeit) is a repressed experience which only becomes a trauma after
the event. Though part of his thinking as early as the 1890s, Freud elaborated on
this idea in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in his work with World War I veterans
(Freud, 1976). See also any number of commentators on belatedness, especially
Cathy Caruth (1996). Interestingly, for Jean Laplanche (via Lacan), the notion of
afterwardsness moves both forwards and backwards, engaging with the enigmatic
inheritance of the (parental) other.
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NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Assmann, Aleida. (2007). Europe: A community of memory? GHI Bulletin 40:1125.
Bojadzija-Dan, Amira. (2011). Reading sensation: Memory and movement in Charlotte
Delbos Auschwitz and After. In Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann (eds.), Memory
and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (pp. 194209).
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Caruth, Cathy. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore:
Hopkins Fulfillment Service.
Creet, Julia. (2002). The hypermnesiac archive of Danilo Kis. In Rebecca Comay (ed.),
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Creet, Julia, and Kitzmann, Andreas (eds.). (2011). Memory and Migration:
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Dek, Istvn, Gross, Jan Tomasz, and Judt, Tony. (2000). The Politics of Retribution in
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Delbo, Charlotte. (1995). Auschwitz and After. Translated by Rosette C. Lamont. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
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Derrida, Jacques. (1998). Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Freud, Sigmund. (1976). The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by
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Hirsch, Marianne. (2012). The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture
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Lamberti, Elena, and Fortunati, Vita. (2009). Memories and Representations of War: The
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Between the therapeutic and the democratic?

Mediating disability memories online
RED CHIDGEY
ABSTRACT
Disabled people constitute the largest minority in the world (United Nations, 2006).
As such, a study of contemporary memory-making practices around disability can
provide a crucial lens through which to engage with ongoing issues of socioeconomic
and cultural marginalization. This article examines two digital memory projects which
showcase the life stories and creative outputs of people with disabilities: the Museum of
the Person USA (Bloomington, US) and Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and
Difference (Toronto, Canada). I argue that a close analysis of these projects illustrates
a current tension between autobiographical, self-expressive memory narratives and
those orientated by wider sociopolitical claims. Significantly, gendered aspects of
disability discourses also work to unsettle the boundaries of what we understand
the therapeutic and democratic to be. At present there is scant research taking
people with disabilities own testimony and experience as its core sources. The rise
of networked technologies and the opportunities this creates for marginal memories
to be publicly shared and witnessed therefore provides a compelling context through
which to examine the mediation of disability stories online, and the ways in which
these memories can act as tentative resources for social justice claims.
Introduction
As scholars in the social sciences and humanities have theorized, we are currently
experiencing the rise of an auto/biographical society tied to new forms of digital
technologies and consumer culture in which life stories are everywhere (Plummer,
2001:78). In this new confessional society (Bauman, 2007), boundaries
separating the private and the public are being blurred, with citizens demonstrating
an increasing sense of obligation or virtue in sharing personal information about
themselves in the public realm, including through much frequented social media
sites. In turn, public institutions in the West are increasingly inviting citizens to
tell your story in cooperation with them, drawing on new media technologies
and platforms to do so (Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007; UNESCO, 2003).
Explaining this shift, museum and heritage scholars have suggested that facilitating
audiences to present narratives and images about their own lives can demonstrate
social inclusion pathways of particular importance to engaging otherwise
marginalized groups such as those from low socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnic
minorities and people with disabilities. Notably, such groups have historically
remained outside of the core audience (and representative agents) of museums,
archives and galleries in the West and demand new strategies for inclusion and
engagement (Dodd et al., 2008; Sandell, Dodd and Garland-Thomson, 2010; Tlili,
2008).2
In her study of several museums in the UK and US, Thumim (2010, 2012)
scrutinizes the aims, functions and outcomes of recent museum projects
incorporating public self-representation activities in their cultural programming.
She identifies two main drivers behind these projects: a therapeutic function,
focusing on issues of self-expression and identity building for diverse audiences,
and a democratic function, based on assumptions that greater visibility of
marginalized communities, using online technologies, equates to greater
democratic participation and active citizenship. Appeals to such drivers are
woven throughout museum mission statements and policy documents. While
therapeutic and democratic drivers are invariably intertwined, Thumim highlights
how such practices may nevertheless end up competing with each other, with
the less politically transformative, self-expressive therapeutic function taking
precedence. In this vein, Thumim questions how far visibility and democratic
participation can be achieved in top-down museum initiatives that mandate
people to perform their ordinariness (perhaps even their marginality), without
connecting these initiatives to broader social and political processes of democratic
participation. The manner in which public institutions maintain their control of
representations, by compiling certain narratives and frameworks to mediate public
self-representations, must also be considered. Thumim provides the example of
museum initiatives that ask participants to upload their photos and memories
of particular museum objects, while the authority and expertise to select and
curate these objects remains with the institution (2010:296). For Thumim, merely
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participating in public-facing initiatives is not enough to substantiate democratic

claims: there needs to be a more manifest engagement with questions of power
and agency.
Engaging critically with Thumims findings, this paper draws on empirical
research on two projects re-mediating disability life stories online: the Museum
of the Person virtual museum (www.museumoftheperson.org, Bloomington,
US) and the Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference project
(www.envisioningnewmeanings.ca, Toronto, Canada). These initiatives can
be mapped within a broader shift in museums and galleries in particular reengaging with disability issues and forms of representation (Dodd et al., 2008;
Sandell et al., 2010; Sandell and Fraser, 2014). These two case studies have been
selected for their focus on people with disabilities self-representing themselves
within an institutional context.3 Both university-based projects use arts-methods
and storytelling approaches, including oral history, digital storytelling and
photographic workshops; and both use digital platforms to showcase the resulting
audio-visual outputs. After first considering the relevance and resonance of
therapeutic and democratic discourses to disabled communities in the US
and Canada, I then examine the ways in which democratic and therapeutic
(Thumim 2010, 2012) discourses of disability, impairment and disablement are
constructed via my selected case study sites, alongside the role of memories
within this.4 As I demonstrate, nominally the Museum of the Person USA site
has a stronger democratic orientation and the Envisioning New Meanings of
Disability and Difference project is more therapeutic-led. However, I argue
that an analytical framework referring to therapeutic discourses needs to be
further contextualized, in light of different communities varying relationships
to therapeutic practices as a site of regulation and social control (Goodley,
2011), and repositioned through contemporary discourses of postfeminism and
neoliberalism that call for subjectsespecially womento perform projects of
the self in publicly mediated sites (Gill and Scharff, 2013). Through a discourse
analysis of the two case study sites, I also attend to the blurred lines between the
therapeutic and the democratic when considering participants vernacular
engagements with the politics of redistribution and recognition (Fraser, 1996;
Loja et al., 2013) in their life story projects. Through this article I argue
that while a therapeutic-democratic framework for understanding publically
mediated life story projects remains a useful analytic, this framework can be
further repositioned and critiqued precisely through the marginalized memories
of excluded citizens, such as people with disabilities.
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Disability, citizenship and the democratic

In terms of democratic practices and discourses, disabled people have been
historically maligned and excluded from the category of citizenship. In the United
States, hegemonic discourses have posited people with impairments as deficient
and dependent. These attributes are further shaped by practices of colonialism
and capitalism, which sit in tension with foundational American national myths
of independence and autonomy. The disabled person is therefore constructed
as an incapable citizen (Nielsen, 2012). Within a Canadian context, Prince
(2009) examines the policy contexts through which people with disabilities are
rendered as absent citizens, facing numerous barriers to social, economic, legal
and cultural participation and recognition in society. Shaped by such horizons of
marginalization and exclusion, the rise of disability testimony has become a potent
site of intervention in hegemonic discourses of ableism, as well as a potential site
for education, policy and social connection.
Caveats are needed, however, to temper any overly positive claims for new
media as a site for expanding citizenship practices. If digital media has been
celebrated as a means of increasing democratic representationthrough sharing
voice and challenging hegemonic power structures (see Carpentier, 2011; Jenkins
and Thorburn, 2003)the use and role of ICTs and digital technologies in disabled
peoples lives has been contested. Online technologies can act as a lifeline as well
as a site for acquiring cultural and social capital for the person with an impairment,
circumventing the loss of physical capital that many disabled people experience
in real-time settings and locations (Loja et al., 2013; Seymour and Lupton, 2004).
Recent studies, however, also highlight how structural concerns, such as the digital
divide, accessibility limitations regarding the world wide web and the prevalence
of digital illiteracy, delimit the use of digital culture as a site of personal, social and
political engagement for people with disabilities (Dobransky and Hargittai, 2006;
Macdonald and Clayton, 2013). Such factors intertwine to create and delimit the
horizon for potential citizenship practices and digitally mediated memory work,
and they create the context through which institutionally mediated disability life
story projects take shape.
Disability, therapeutic discourses and social control

There are also significant tensions with regard to what constitutes the
therapeutic within this analytical framework, especially when considered
through the context of disability. As a textual repository of historical meanings
and interpretations, the Oxford Dictionaryitself an institutional memory
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textdefines therapeutic as to treat medically. The prevalent model

of understanding disability since the nineteenth century has been through a
medical lens, where disability is treated as an inherent attribute of deviant
bodies (Goggin and Newell, 2003:xvii). Consequently, the medical model
categorizes some bodies as wrong and in need of special measures and
segregation. The term therapeutic is discursively haunted by disability
histories and memories of marginalization. Such an awareness of disability
histories can draw attention to the various tensions of appeals to therapeutic
discourses: people of color, queer, women and the working class have all been
historically subjected to the therapeutic gaze in Western societies as a form of
social control (Goodley, 2011; Oliver, 1995; Reeve, 2004).
We can see this evidenced in Pelkas (2012) recent documentation of the
disability rights movement in the US. Alongside oral history, Pelka attends to
the institutional contexts where people with disabilities have been positioned
through therapeutic discourses as a form of control and oppression. In the
aftermath of World War Two in particular, people with disabilities (including
returning veterans who had been disabled by war) were forced through
rehabilitation programs in an attempt to move them into the workplace. (It is
worth noting that historically, as well as in contemporary times, the ability to
work has been used as a governmental discourse and presumed measure to
define disability.) As Pelka recounts, rehabilitation programs adopted a whole
man approach, where people needing aids such as wheelchairs and prosthetics
were subjected to the disciplinary gaze of medical experts who deemed people
with disabilities as having maladjusted personalities that needed to be corrected
in order for them to get on (2012:1417). Across the twentieth century in the
US, people with disabilities, or people who were seen as deviant to the norm
and thus labelled as disabled in some way, were incarcerated within mental
institutions where structure, direction and therapy were prescribed. As
Pelka details, in many instances incarceration in these institutions were thought
to provide milieu therapy, where just being confined in such a place was
alleged to be therapeutic (2012:77). Remembering such historic practices,
and remaining open to similar practices being carried out today, alerts us to
the need to be critical about the term therapeutic to best describe initiatives
drawing on public self-expression and self-narrationprecisely because some
communities have a different historical relation to therapeutic discourses
and practices than others.
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Case study 1: Museum of the Person USA

As part of my case study analysis, I have sought to understand how democratic
and therapeutic discourses are being constructed and contested in contemporary
disability life story projects. The Museum of the Person (MoP) USA hub is an online
portal dedicated to the production, dissemination and sharing of autobiographical
memories of everyday common people (Worcman, 2006). Developed by the
Center on Aging and Community (CAC) in the Indiana Institute on Disability
and Community at Indiana University, Bloomington, this project is dedicated
to collecting stories of local residents with physical and/or learning difficulties,
alongside non-disabled community groups and participants (Stafford, 2005).5 The
MoP hub positions itself as part of a global network of life story initiatives in Brazil,
Portugal and Canada, all branded through the name Museum of the Person.6 What
ties these networked projects together are common goals and methodologies, with
each portal concerned with using the power of life stories to bring communities
together, and to create a different social memory (Worcman, 2006:2).
Autobiographical memory is highly valued within the Museum of the Person
network, especially when social memory can be turned into what the co-founder
Karen Worcman articulates as social information (Worcman, 2006). As the MoP
USA mission statement states:
history.
(www.
museumoftheperson.org/about).
Above and beyond a therapeutic function of identity building and self-affirmation,
there is a clear social transformative driver articulated here: memory is seen as
an instrument for social and cultural development with the potential to lead
to peace. An emancipatory function is strongly embedded in the MoPs wider
objective of mak[ing] our society a more democratic and fair one, where people
who would normally be invisible have the chance to be included and respected as
history makers as we all are (Museu da Pessoa, 2012). Crucially, this democratic
approach is aligned with the chosen MoP methodologies of oral history and digital
storytelling, which are geared towards creating an agentic self for participants
(Hull and Katz, 2006) through the co-production of mediated life stories and
creative memory work. Through such methods, everyday memories of ordinary
people become counter-narratives to hegemonic accounts of history and agency,
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with the potential to draw attention to embedded structures of discrimination and

marginalization (Perks and Thomson, 2004; Thompson, 2000).
The choice of the term social memory in the MoP mission statementrather
than public memory, cultural memory or collective memory, which are other
common monikersis striking. We can read this terminology as putting an
emphasis on the social acts of telling, preserving and accessing lived experience
and testimony, as a site of shared articulation. There is a resonance with the
concerns of social justice and social transformation, which would not be present
in the same way if public memory or cultural memory were deployed as
operating terms. With regard to personal testimony as a democratic resource, it
is a truism that historical narratives of the past routinely fix themselves to the
accounts of the elite and privileged, particularly with respect to gender, class
and race axes (Hall, 2002). The non-disabled/able-bodied must also be included
in this scope of hegemonic power relations. The MoP mission statement rhetoric
that every person plays a role as an agent of historical change and an author
of history foregrounds a democratizing vision of history, in which memory
can operate as the connective structure of societies (Assmann, 1992:293).
Such an approach calls for a radical revisioning and revaluation of individual,
everyday testimony, including who counts as a historical agent and what can
be learned from embodied memories and experience.
To understand how life stories are re-mediated online in the MoP USA project,
a brief visual account of the website will help to establish the interface of this
site (see Figure 1). Alongside the top section of the web page is the MoP logo of
three interlinking circles. Beside this logo are three information tabs: Projects
(listing the memory projects undertaken by the MoP USA), About (including
the background information and mission statement for the MoP network and
the institutionally mandated privacy and terms of use statements), and Contact
(providing key contact information for MoP USA staff). In the right-hand
column of the page is four sections: a free text box to search archived content
of the site, links to other story sites (including the Center for Digital Storytelling
and the Museum of the PersonBrazil), share your story instructions and login functions, and tour the museum mechanisms, including links to events,
news, text stories, video stories, website privacy notices and website terms of
use. Situated under the logo is a flash animation sequence of photos, drawn
from archived content on the site, and a Recent Comments field to show the
latest user interactions. Archived content is presented on the home page, with
the latest posts appearing at the top of the screen. This content is a combination
of text, photos and YouTube embedded life story interview clips. The YouTube
videos are also captioned so as to be more accessible. The MoP USA site
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Figure 1. Museum of the Person USA website (www.museumoftheperson.org, January 2014).
can be logged on tofor online story submissions and commentingfrom

several social media accounts, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo
and LinkedIn.
At the time of writing this article in the winter of 2013, the most recent post on the
MoP USA site offers a short summary of an oral history interview conducted with
Indiana resident Katrina Gossett, video-recorded at the 2012 annual conference of the
Indiana Governors Council for People with Disabilities. This interview is thematized
around her experience of wheelchair accessibility in the urban environment (Gossett,
2013). A quote from Gossett is presented in the short written summary about living in
a downtown Indianapolis neighborhood and how buildings are slowly being adapted
to become more accessible to those in wheelchairs. Gossett is cited as saying: Ive
noticed that the stores and restaurants have made an effort to become accessible even
though the [older] architecture is not ideally designed for it. Within the video clip of
her interviewlinked at the bottom of the written post and presented in a six-minute
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segmentthe listener also learns about unsuccessful accessibility measures: such as

the entry buttons for automatic doors placed too high for wheelchair users to reach,
which Gossett negotiates by having her service dog reach up and press the button for
her, finally enabling access to the building.
Gossetts account offers a tacit illustration of the social model of disability in
operation. In this conceptualization, a persons impairment relates to their physiological
condition, while disability is the socially constructed and maintained phenomenon of
exclusion (Goggin and Newell, 2003:21). The social model of disabilityalthough
contested in its strongest forms for negating the bodily experience of disability
and overly focusing on social attitudes and environments (Shakespeare, 2006)
emphasizes how policies, architecture, legislation and cultural attitudes actively
construct the category of disability (United Nations, 2006). Social memories around
the experience of disability, therefore, can help to illuminate aspects of the social
model of disability and provide resources for social change. Life story narratives can
serve as effective, situated counter-memories and subjugated knowledges (Foucault,
1980:82) through which individual and collective experiences of disability can be
named, explored and interrogated. Such accounts carry with them a sensory, arresting
character: to hear a voice, to see a face, to listen to a story, can be a powerful mediator.
They can be interventional in terms of shaping social understandings of marginalized
experience, while also providing knowledge and calls for accountability within policy
and legislative contexts.
While life stories are powerful precisely because of their embodied, sensory and
evocative qualities, they are nonetheless mediated texts. Institutionally speaking,
forms of mediation include the co-creation of life story testimony through the presence
and agenda of the interviewer, the process of editing testimonies and packaging them
online, and even the tags and meta-data used to label content when presented online
(Perks and Thomson, 2004; Thumim, 2012). The ways in which the value of social
memories from below are signaled as important is a part of the memory work carried
out by the institution, as part of their mnemonic framing. In the case of the MoP USA,
this is mainly achieved by presenting mediated memories as a site of empathy and
affect (Landsberg, 2004), as a site of recognition. Empathythat state of feeling as
other to facilitate social connection and understanding (Pedwell, 2012)is actively
performed within the MoP USA site. Seeking to interpellate the reader/listener as
an empathetic subject, Gossetts quote about wheelchair accessibility downtown is
framed thusly: Through Gossetts eyes, we understand how unobstructed pathways,
smooth curb cuts, accessible shop entrances and automatic door openers within her
reach can make a difference. The listener/viewer is asked to share Gossetts viewpoint
and experience, to re-situate themselves bodily and imaginatively, indeed, to reach
that point of understanding and to see through her eyes. As a sensory, affective
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resource, memory is uniquely placed to create such moments of interpellation and to

provoke new understandings of those who experience multiple systems of exclusion.
Numerous life story testimonies on the MoP USA site implicitly invoke a politics
of redistribution with regard to disability, moving from the personal to the structural.
Within Nancy Frasers (1996) conceptualization, a politics of redistribution focuses
on socioeconomic injustices, including exploitation, economic marginalization and
deprivation. A politics of redistributionor at least a vernacular appeal to its logics
and analyticsis arguably presented within the testimony of Sylvia Jackson, an
older woman with a mobility impairment. In her video-recorded testimony, collected
at the 2012 annual conference of the Indiana Governors Council for People with
Disabilities, Jackson describes how she had to sell her home to avoid foreclosure after
losing her job within the Nation Able Networks Senior Community Employment
Program, a program funded by a US Department of Labor Grant, which seeks to
find employment and provides assistance for disabled people over 55. Her loss of
employment was due to funding cuts to the program. With a horrible irony, Jackson is
now struggling herself to find a job (which she used to help others to do), and she is
competing against younger candidates and people without disabilities. She states: I
dont think the federal government understands that when you cut somebody off from
this program youre just dumped, youre done (Jackson, 2013). She explains how she
cannot live on disability allowance, especially while being financially accountable for
purchasing expensive mobility equipment. Jackson has a policy point to make about
redundancy, cuts and unemployment: My point is that I would like to see that theres
some kind of follow onthat they [the government] assist us in some way. Her
appeal has a particular resonance in this current economic climate. Since the global
financial crisis of 2008, governments have carried out particularly assaultive welfare
cuts, which have disproportionately impacted people with disabilities. People with
disabilities are reliant on health, social care, housing and transport service; and, as a
result of low employment rates and the additional costs of living with an impairment,
they are more likely to live in poverty and/or rely on benefits to survive (Clarke,
2013; Grant and Wood, 2010:11). In Jacksons mediated memory, a demand for
redistribution is made and documented.
Case study 2: Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference

The Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference (ENMDD) project, my
second case study, offers a striking counter-point to the redistribution and democraticorientated narratives strongly at work in the MoP USA site. The ENMDD project ran
between 2008 and 2010 as a collaboration between the Womens Studies Program at
Trent University, regional branches of the YWCA, the Women with Disabilities and
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Deaf Womens Program at Springtide Resources, and the Womens College Research
Institute at Womens College Hospital. This project entailed group-based arts sessions
of women with disabilities and physical differences, a public exhibition and a multimedia website for participants to use photography and digital stories to boldly present
themselves in their own words and images (University of Toronto, 2009).
The main crux of difference between the ENMDD project and the MoP USA site
analyzed at the level of web mediationincludes a greater emphasis on personal
reflection and self-created works and a declared engagement with self-esteem, selfimage and wider social imaginaries in the ENMDD project. The therapeutic flavor of
this project can be apprehended through the project statement posted on the site:
Visual images shape how we see the world. Stories have the power to change
how we view and understand many things: our identity, our body image, our own
experience of difference. Sharing personal stories and alternative images is an
important part of creating change (http://www.envisioningnewmeanings.ca).
The lexicon of creating change is shared with the MoP USA project, but with a
notable different sense of location and mode of address. Within the MoP USA mission
statement, the tellers of life story are constructed as an every person and the audience
is shaped as listeners to others stories. In the ENMDD project, the mode of address
is shifted to the familiar and personable, as indicated through the collective we.
The register of social change is also located primarily on an individual, subjective
level, as Stories have the power to change how we view and understand many
things: our identity, our body image, our own experience of difference. As common
with therapeutic narratives (Illouz, 2007:48), nodes of experience and identity are at
the forefront, presented as the very loci through which to make sense of disability
experiences. As the introductory blurb to the arts-based project makes clear on the
home page: Workshop activities and discussions explored identity and the meaning
we find in our experiences. How do we want to be seen? What is important to us?
Repetition of the words identity and experience points to both a therapeutic
narrative and a politics of recognition. Within the therapeutic narrative the project is
hinged around a collectivity (we) based on individual self-realization; significantly,
one of the principal investigators for this project works within clinical and counseling
settings. While the MoP USA site documented testimonies of welfare cuts,
unemployment, accessibility options and the built environment, ENMDD turns the
gaze inwards: How do we want to be seen? and Can I love myself completely?,
it asks.
The bulk of textual space on the website is given over to participants reflections
about their stories and the experience of taking part in the project (see Figure 2). In the
top left-hand corner of the ENMDD website is the projects logo. As a header, there
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are tabs for Home (taking the user back to the main page), Disability and Difference
(outlining the project rationale), Stories (a statement describing the importance of
life stories for sharing experience), Reflections (calling on audiences to think about
common themes such as love, community and self-esteem), Accessibility (to select
viewing options to facilitate the use of the site by the visual and audio impaired),
and Contact (to contact a project practitioner). On the left-hand side are the names of
fourteen artistsone of whom has chosen to remain anonymousand links to their
series of work produced within the ENMDD project.
Figure 2. Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference website

(www.envisioningnewmeanings.ca, July 2014).
This turn to self-reflexivity and self-esteem can be mapped across wider neoliberal
and postfeminist discourses, where neoliberalism operates as a mobile, calculated
technology for governing subjects who are constituted as self-managing, autonomous
and enterprising and postfeminism as the media terrain in which political engagements
become subservient and sometimes evacuated in favor of reflexive explorations of
identity, body, choice, individualism and self-transformation issues (Gill and Scharff,
2013:5). On the home page of the ENMDD website, an indication of the meaning of
the project title is provided: En-vi-sion: To picture in the mind, to imagine possible.
The contours again appear interior, rather than community or collectively orientated.
While the MoP USA site posits shared social memories as a resource for building
empathetic routes to equality and social justice, the ENMDD website suggests more
softly that Some of the stories and photos ask others to explore their own responses to
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diverse bodies and appearances, as Life is about embracing a range of experiences.

Memory is not mentioned on the website but stories are. An explanation of the
methodology for the ENMDD project is provided: following the pioneering work of
the Center for Digital Storytelling (see Hartley and McWilliam, 2009), participants
were given cameras to capture their daily lives, and workshops were used to build
skills and narratives for a set of short films and photographs. The participants were
women from inter-generational age cohorts, with a range of disabilities and nonnormative embodiments, including mobility and sensory disabilities, chronic illness,
learning disabilities, and facial and physical bodily marks. Memory materials are
embedded in the participants art projects, including the use of family and childhood
photos and first-person narration in the 23 minute short films.
The video stories, photographs and accompanying written reflections presented on
the ENMDD website are wide ranging, with varying esthetic approaches. A common
thread running through many is the desire to challenge stereotypes around disability.
As a blurb on the website states: We are often seen only within the narrow confines
of two common stereotypes: the tragic, pitied victim, or the spirited survivor held
up as a source of inspiration. These reoccurring stereotypes (Loja et al., 2013) are
engaged with in the memory works; the videos in particular offer incredibly moving,
thought-provoking and at times also humorous and confrontational narratives to
unpick the ableist imaginary from which such stereotypes become established. In
Lindsay Fishers video, she uses a series of images of her asymmetric face, posing
in different ways and from different angles. Fisher talks about desire, relationships,
her connection with her body and her consciousness of how other people look at her
(First impressions). In Anne Harlands video (Assumptions), she addresses how
people assume that she is able- bodied, even to the point of shouting at her for parking
in disabled spaces, due to the invisible disability of her muscular dystrophy. With the
increasing loss of use of her hands, she states: Like the phoenix, I need to reestablish
my self esteem, my identity. In Tanya Workmans video (Difference), the maker
reflects upon her creative journey in taking up photography, including the experience
of seeing images of herself in a medical journal while at a doctors surgeryframed
as Exhibit A and Exhibit B photos, pre and post operation. For Workman, starting to
take photos of other people with facial disfigurementsin a kind of talking back to
the dehumanizing discourse of medical framingswas about documenting Not the
clinical, but the person themselves.
These videos, reflections and photographs document autobiographical, as well as
autobiographically inspired fictions, of lived experiences of disability, including the
temporalities of struggle, triumph, connection and isolation. Therapeutic narratives
figure strongly in these memory works, but so too does a politics for recognition.
Across the testimonies and creative works there are comments about, and attempts to
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intervene in, ableist imaginaries, in particular in how the non-disabled gaze invalidates
impaired bodies (Loja et al., 2013:193). As Fraser (1996) elaborates, a politics of
recognition is concerned with forms of symbolic revaluation, encompassing the pluralist
recognition of difference and diversity. One way this can be achieved is by creating
new legitimacies and symbolic frameworks for respecting and valuing marginalized
groups own forms of cultural production. While a politics of redistribution targets
socioeconomic change, a politics of recognition brings to bear the crucial significance
of identity, symbolic production, cultural value and participation. Here the goal, in its
most plausible form, is a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or
dominant cultural norms is no longer the price of equal respect (Fraser, 1996:3). For
Fraser, recognition and redistribution models of political articulation are analytical,
not ontological, categories and therefore inevitably overlap and intertwine.
Crucially, in terms of our discussion of analytical frameworks, a politics of
recognition is not about self-realization played out along the psychological level
which a therapeutic discourse pertains to. Instead recognition relates to issues of
justice in the wider socioeconomic and cultural sphere (Fraser, 1996:24). As Fraser
suggests, to be misrecognized
is not simply to be thought ill of, looked down on, or devalued in others conscious
attitudes or mental beliefs. It is rather to beprevented from participating as a
peer in social life as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of interpretation
and evaluation that constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect or
esteem. When such patterns of disrespect and disesteem are institutionalized,
for example, in law, social welfare, medicine, public education and/or the social
practices and group mores that structure everyday interaction, they impede parity
of participation, just as surely as do distributive inequities (1996:2526).
For the women involved in the ENMDD project, their creative works negotiate
ableist discourses of the bodydiscourses which are also highly gendered, as the
female body is assumed to perform and represent in ascribed feminine ways.
Rupturing the non-disabled and hegemonic gaze is done both poetically and
confrontationally within Jes Sachses video Body language. Stating that she
has a fused spine and wanted to know what everyone was looking at, Sachses
video features her first-person narration over a series of beautiful photographs of
herself posed nude: by a crane, in an empty room, by a window, on a bridge. She
discusses how scared she is to present herself like thisunadorned, exposedand
the soundtrack of a beating heart punctuates the air of the video. In the written text
accompanying the piece, Sachse both elaborates on her reasons for creating this
memory work, as well as wishing to evade any easy to pin down interpretations.
Recognition is intersectional. As she writes:
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This is not just about disability. this is not just about me. this is not about pc
[political correctness] and new words to mean disabled without having to name
difference. This is not our time to shine. this is not cripples for a cure. This is
not about educating the masses and pissing on pity. This is not art. this is not
en vogue. this is not an excuse to get naked.
Well, it could be that.
This is me. This is her pain, his voice, my words, our histories. This is a story.
This is (www.envisioningnewmeanings.ca).
Concluding remarks
Mediation and re-mediation are vital factors in how shared testimonies are
produced and represented in the public sphere. In this article I have understood
mediation to be the social, cultural and technological practices shaping,
disseminating and bringing to interpretation different sets of embodied memories
around disability and difference. Processes of re-mediation are multiple: from
recording life testimonies (through video-recording, audio-recording and written
narratives), to uploading life story documents (including family photographs
and other personal memorabilia), to the dissemination and consumption of these
accounts. Storiesincluding memory fragments and materialsare a way
to evoke, problematize, imagine and create. Empathy and recognition remain
important aims within the storytelling process.
The Museum of the Person USA hub re-mediates life story histories of disability,
representing everyday, lived experience. Within this project participants call for
a politics of redistribution in terms of accessible urban planning and welfare
provision. Democratic drivers are threaded throughout this site, with the conditions
for an empathetic encounter being consciously staged within the institutional
mediation of sitealthough wider discourses of austerity and cuts remain underarticulated in the institutional framing of life story narratives.
The Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference project has a manifestly
therapeutic aim and idiom; this is captured in the discursive register of the personal
deployed within the site and its stated concern with nodes of self-esteem and image. In line
with seeking a politics of recognition, ENMDD attempts to shift social imaginaries: with
testimonies challenging ableist imaginaries and creating new narratives around disability,
beauty, sexuality, agency and moments of confrontation and vulnerability. Although
the focus on the personal could be read as complicit with postfeminist and neoliberal
discourses, particularly with the gendered life stories of women being presented for the
public gaze, the non-normative expressions of embodiment, subjectivity and experience
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put forward on this site disrupt too easy notions of the therapeutic as a solely selfaffirming, politically divorced discourse (while at the same time remembering that the
medical model haunts the therapeutic as an analytical term, and that therapeutic values
of finding identity and self-esteem are still of vital importance to people with disabilities
who have to intimately negotiate ableist imaginaries as well as socioeconomic and legal
obstacles).
Through this article I have argued that while a therapeutic-democratic framework
for understanding publically mediated life story projects remains a useful analytic, this
framework can be further repositioned and critiqued precisely through the marginalized
memories of excluded citizens. I adopted Frasers (1996) framework of a politics of
redistribution and recognition as a counter-point to Thumims (2010, 2012) framework
crucially, not as a replacement, but as a parallel lens through which issues of agency,
political demands and transformative politics can be further articulated and interrogated.
Deploying these two frameworks in a productive frictionnoting points of overlap and
distinctionI argue, can help us to understand nuanced systems of institutional and
personal mediation and, crucially, of agency. Within the life story projects analyzed in
this paper, social memories of disability offer compelling and interventional discourses
for understanding the workings of power, society and citizenship more widely. These
testimonies bring to the fore interlocking issues of labor, policy, cultural attitudes, human
rights, technology, creativity, identity, social exclusion, prejudice, agency and resistance.
NOTES
1
Many thanks to Phil Stafford and Jane Harlan-Simmons at Indiana University for
generously sharing their knowledge and working practices of the Museum of the
Person USA website with me, and to the insights of Kobi Kabalek and the anonymous
peer reviewers, which helped to sharpen the arguments made in the paper.
New projects exploring issues of representation, access and disability agency

in museums, universities and arts organizations in the UK, US and Canada have
emerged in recent years (see Dodd et al., 2008; Sandell et al., 2010; Sandell and
Fraser, 2014).
See Its Our Story for a grassroots-led disability life-story project. Launched by the
Disability Media Initiative, this project has collected over a thousand life history
testimonies with disability activists across the US in advance of the twentieth
anniversary of the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (http://dmi-us.
blogspot.co.uk).
105
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The wording of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) remains contested.
This document states:
The term disability means, with respect to an individual: (A) a physical or mental
impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such
individual; (B) a record of such an impairment; or (C) being regarded as having such
an impairment.
As Kudlick (2003:767) suggests, drawing on the argument of the activist Mary
Johnson, such a definition implies that disabled refers to a political or a moral
judgement, based not on the individual in question, but also on others perceptions
and attitudes about how society should function.
Four main principles shape the work of the Indiana Institute on Disability and
Community: (1) People with disabilities exercise choice and control over their daily
lives; (2) Persons with disabilities have dignity and are treated with respect; (3)
Individuals with disabilities and their families are involved in the design, operation
and monitoring of services and supports that affect them; (4) Enhancing the broader
community improves the lives of all, including those with disabilities (www.iidc.
indiana.edu).
The Museu da Pessoa in Brazil was the inaugural Museum of the Person project.
This virtual museum and private organization is a highly successful life story project
which has been in operation for over twenty years (see Clarke, 2009). Other portals
in the network include the now defunct Museum of the Person hubs in Portugal and
Canada (see Gillespie et al., 2005).
106
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110
Memory as haunting1
ZUZANNA DZIUBAN
ABSTRACT
Drawing upon recent scholarly studies on the figure of the ghost in the broad and
interdisciplinary field of memory research, this article explores the potential of
haunting metaphors to address past instances of violence that affect present cultural
realities. Examining social, political and cultural contexts in which ghosts are produced
and encountered, summoned and exorcised, the paper also provides a detailed reading
of a specific spatio-temporality of the presence of the ghost: the Muranw district in
Warsaw, haunted by the specters of its forgotten Jewish inhabitants.
Introduction
The figure of the ghostboth as a non-figurative entity and as a productive
metaphorhas attracted academic attention across disciplines in recent years, so
that scholars have pointed to the advent of a new cultural turn in the humanities: the
spectral turn. Widespread contemporary interest in ghosts, phantoms and specters,
drawing on traditional folklore studies and literary research on Gothic and Victorian
writing, leads to the propagation of new sciences of ghosts, or hauntologies. The
present-day rehabilitation of the heretofore marginal figure of the ghost as a subject of
critical study can thus be seen primarily as an attempt to reinvest the ghost with new
interpretive potential. Therefore, though polyvocal and dispersed, the vocabularies of
haunting reinstated into the field of social and human sciences have at least one thing
in common: demarginalization of the figure of the ghost in theoretical reflection goes
hand in hand with an effort to critically elaborate on existing discursive practices
Zuzanna Dziuban
and classical scientific approaches both to ghosts and to social and cultural realities.
Ghostly knowledge, as Avery Gordon claims in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the
Sociological Imagination, stands for alternative stories we ought to and can write
about the relationship among power, knowledge and experience (2008:23). Thus,
based on recognition of the close connection between ghosts, power, exclusion and
violence, the language of haunting provides scholars with new tools to conceptualize
hegemonic repression and practice critical demarginalization.
Originally envisaged as a survey of the recent studies on the figure of the ghost in
the field of social and human sciences, this paper focuses more closely on the concept
of haunting as related to the realm of history and memory, and on the question of the
heuristic potential of haunting metaphors in the broad and interdisciplinary field of
memory research. Through exploration of the conceptualizations of haunting in the
works of such scholars as Avery Gordon, Alexander Etkind, Kathleen Brogan and
Renee Bergland, the paper investigates the meaning of the figure of the ghost as a
medium of marginalized or erased memories and the role of haunting as a metaphor
to describe processes of cultural transmission of problematic pasts. Examining the
social, political and cultural contexts in which ghosts are produced and encountered,
summoned and exorcised, the paper also provides a detailed reading of a specific
spatio-temporality of the presence of the ghost: the Muranw district in Warsaw,
haunted by the specters of its forgotten Jewish inhabitants.
The spectral turn: Demarginalizing ghosts

It seems that ghosts are everywhere these days. This observation, made by Maria
del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (2010:ix), editors of a collection of essays entitled
Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, is easily substantiated.
The proliferation of ghosts in contemporary fiction, popular literature, cinematic
productions, TV series, magazines and quasi-documentaries, as well as in scholarly
research on the esthetic, political and even economic realms, is both undeniable and
hard to miss. The language of haunting influences scientific imagination, artistic
practices, literary work and the practices of everyday life. As a result, the presence
of ghosts can be detected in the most disparate fields of cultural production: from
Jacques Derridas works to Alejandro Amenabars movies, from post-colonial studies
to HBO. The wide variety of encounters with phantoms and specters in both academic
writing and popular culture, explored and interpreted in Peeren and del Pilar Blancos
book, has led to recognition of the growing importance of the figure of the ghost, as
well as the advent of a new spectral turn.
I must admit that I am not a particular fan of the rhetoric of turnsthat is, of
weak paradigmatic coups in humanistic reflection, which are aimed at destabilizing
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Memory as haunting
previous theoretical, interdisciplinary, weak master narratives and which have

heretofore been organized around the concepts of language, text, image, performance
or space. However, the proclamation of a new cultural spectral turn in the humanities
caught my attention and captured my imagination. The discovery that the language
of haunting not only freely crosses boundaries between scientific disciplines but also,
even if rather paradoxically, bridges the gap between imageries of popular/everyday
and academic cultures is definitely an important one. Thus, what the phrase spectral
turn seems to suggest is the need to concentrate on new cultural dictionaries and,
as a consequence, new ways of conceptualizing a cultural field. Even if it has not
and will not radically transform the field of social and human sciences, haunting
certainly can be recognized as an influential and interdisciplinary concept, in the
sense Mieke Bal (2002) attributed to the term. In particular, it is worth noting the
recognized interdisciplinary and transcultural character of the concept of haunting. Its
polyvocality and ability to travel between a variety of disciplinary fields, as well as
cultural and social realms, is, according to del Pilar Blanco and Peeren (2010), one of
the features that distinguishes the contemporary spectral turn from its predecessors.
The emphasis placed by the authors of Popular Ghosts on the need to differentiate
between contemporary and previous spectral turns, while at the same time tracing
the roots of the current trend, is also worth examining. On the one hand, it reflects
a respect for the long history of the figure of ghost: its waxes and wanes, inventions
and reinventions. It shows an awareness of changing attitudes towards the ghost
and its changing streams of influence (Davies, 2007; Finucane, 1996). On the other
hand, the imperative to place ghosts in history (Peeren, 2007:85) seems to be
based on metatheoretical reflection. After all, according to historian Joan Scott, the
historicization of the concepts one employs is a crucial element of the self-reflexive
study of culture (Scott, 1992). Thus, work with and on traveling concepts, undertaken
with an awareness of their always cultural, historical and non-universal character, has
to be preluded and complemented by reflection on the theoretical contexts in which
they are operationalized, as well as on their cultural provenance. What is highlighted
here is the need to pay attention not only to the more or less broad semantic field in
which these concepts exist, but also to the contexts in which the category of haunting
is made to operate, its actual functions in the process of knowledge production and
cultural self-understanding. From this perspective, haunting is always a historically
specific cultural experience and as such has to be culturally and historically located.
As Jacques Derrida authoritatively states in Specters of Marx: Every period has
its ghosts (and we have ours), its own experience, its own medium and its proper
hauntological media (Derrida, 1994:241). Moreover, one might add, the presence of
ghosts in different historical periods serves different purposes and performs different
kinds of cultural work.
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Zuzanna Dziuban
Among the most important features of the contemporary spectral turn listed
by the authors of the essays collected in Popular Ghosts is its global, popular and,
at the same time, political character. Reintroduction of the language of haunting
into everyday life (del Pilar Blanco and Peeren, 2010:ix), closely intertwined with
the productive force of the contemporary and, as Derrida would say, fantasmatic
character of global media, points to an important transformation in the figuration of
the relation between ghosts and the everyday. The mutual exclusivity of ghosts and
the everyday, and the separation between these two realms, suspended or interrupted
always only temporarilyby the event of haunting, is nowadays problematized.
The normalization of ghosts, their ubiquity in the realm of popular culture
taking on various forms and evading limitation to one literary or cinematic genre
(such as the Gothic or horror)serves as a proof of their radical demarginalization.
This democratization and, at the same time, commercialization of ghosts is reflected,
for instance, in the growing popularity of ghost-related entertainment and haunting
tourism (DHarlingue, 2010) and in an increased belief in ghosts, detected by social
historians and ethnographers (according to surveys, more than 50% of the US
population believes in the existence of ghosts) (Davies, 2007:242). Thus, ghosts,
rather than being confined to the cultural margins and fringe genres, now appear
as a part of the mainstream, invading the everyday realm and, in doing so, providing
a cultural commentary to its increasingly spectral construction (del Pilar Blanco and
Peeren, 2010:xiii). Here, as del Pilar Blanco and Peeren assume, the figure of the
ghost testifies to the increasing mediatization and, as a consequence, spectralization
of the reality of everyday experience, which at the same time can be interpreted in
terms of the re-enchantment of the world.
Moreover, and more importantly for this paper, the above-mentioned
demarginalization of the ghost in the realm of popular culture seems to be reflected,
though of course with crucial differences, in the shift of the position of ghost in
theoretical reflection. The shifting of the problem of haunting from the margins to the
center of theoretical reflection, associated most frequently with the debate triggered
by Derridas Specters of Marx, entails a radical reconceptualization of the ghost as a
philosophical problem. Critical approaches towards popular belief in ghosts, along
with the constant effort to question and mock their existence, has been a common
denominator of various philosophical and theological projects: Protestantism, the
project of Enlightenment and Freudian psychoanalysis, to mention just a few. The
increasing secularization or Weberian disenchantment of the world moved Western
civilization away from pre-modern ways of seeing things and, in the process, deprived
everything spectral and supernatural that coinhabited the human world (magic, ghosts,
anthropomorphized forces of nature) of its naturalness and obviousness. Ghosts, along
with the belief in the supernatural, were either relegated to act merely as a subject of
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Memory as haunting
art or interpreted in terms of a projection of a troubled psyche or individual mind.

As Colin Davis states: The history of Europe [and European philosophy] can be
understood as the failed attempt to rid itself of its ghosts (2007:8).
The contemporary rehabilitation of the ghost as a subject of critical study goes beyond
traditional philosophical trajectories: the ontological question of whether ghosts exist
has, crucially, been set aside in todays discourse. According to Frederic Jameson,
spectrality does not involve the conviction that the ghosts exist (2008:39). Rather, a
ghost or specter has to be conceived as a deconstructive figure aimed at destabilizing
established dichotomies, binary distinctions and ontological certaintiesa figure of
radical otherness and an agent of alterity (Davis, 2007; Derrida, 1994). The ghost as
a transitional figure, located between radically separate realms (life/death, present/
absent, existent/non-existent, visible/invisible, real/imagined, present/past), becomes
both a tool for and an instance of their problematization. Therefore, the ghost,
described by Avery Gordon as a specific instance of the merging of the visible
and invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present (2008:24), disrupts
the binary distinctions that constitute the basis of metaphysical philosophy, as well
as the various forms of politics of description. This term, borrowed from Italian
philosopher Gianni Vattimo (Vattimo and Zabala, 2011:2), refers to the politics of
truth, understood as a guiding logic of any supposedly universal and, as a consequence,
oppressive philosophy. From this perspective, the potentially critical function of the
figure of a specter is much more important than the problem of the ghosts objectivity.
It is precisely this critical function of the figure of ghost, the fact that it seeks to
destabilize existent orders of power and knowledge and (exclusive) epistemologies,
that has guaranteed its interdisciplinary popularity. The employment of the figure of
the ghost in the quest for justice and democracythat is, focusing on the political
dimension of hauntingis one of the most important features of the contemporary
spectral turn. The possibility of tying the concept of haunting to that of hegemony,
already introduced in Derridas (1994:47) textsheds new light on the figure of
the ghost and allows the practice of producing ghosts to be linked to the operations
of power or hegemony.2 Thus, figurative and non-figurative ghosts have come to
represent both individuals and marginalized and excluded communities without
access to the social and political realm. The figure of a ghost designates ghosted
citizensmarginal populations, social outcasts, social groups located outside the
frames of cultural, social and national communitiesand those who are rendered
invisible and dehumanized. It is inscribed in the concepts of civic or social death
employed to present the condition of penitentiary inmates or prisoners of war. It is
applied to describe the problematic position of homeless people or illegal immigrants,
as well as missing persons (desaparecidos), whose fate cannot be explained.
Thus, the language of haunting has found its way into new theoretical approaches
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Zuzanna Dziuban
towards social exclusion, economic exploitation and political and symbolic violence.
As a concept, it serves as a tool for in-depth critique of past and present essentialist
discourses on identity and epistemologies of blindness (Gordon, 2008:xix), closely
tied to various instances of injustice and economic inequality. That is why, according to
Julian Wolfreys, haunting is a politically charged, subversive force with the potential
to destabilize discourses of power and knowledge and, with that, supposedly stable
subject positions (2002:11). What is haunted, then, are all social, cultural and political
instances of stability, sameness, homogeneity and the self-same.
Let me now turn to the figure of the ghost as it relates to the realm of history
and memory. My intervention here can be seen as a simultaneous attempt to narrow
the semantic field of the concept of haunting and to focus on more specific spatiotemporalities of the presence of ghosts. I employ the term spatio-temporality
deliberately: my argument will lead towards reflection on space and spatial imagery
as a medium of haunting memory.
Haunting memory
The importance of the political dimension of the concept of haunting is acknowledged
by representatives of memory studies, whose use of the term is more and more frequent.
Yet, while locating the problem of haunting within the broad context of social and
political violenceboth physical and symbolicmemory researchers focus mainly
on past instances of violence that affect present cultural realities in disturbing ways.
In other words, the specters to be encountered in the field of memory studies are the
ghosts of those who have perished or disappearedrevenants, the undead or ghosts
of the past. Here, too, the ghost functions as a transitional figure, yet the realms or
realities between which it moves and that it reconnects are, above all, those of the past
and the present, death and life. In this theoretical perspective, the contexts in which
the master metaphor of ghost as go-between (Brogan, 1998:9) is operationalized
return to the figure of the ghost its inherent and definitional historicity.
As a theoretical figurationof the way history is constructed and impacts on
the present (Peeren, 2007:85), the figure of the ghost designates the moment of
the pasts sudden and uncanny interruption or disruption of the present, which is
often experienced as threatening. The disfiguration of the present brought about by
the ghosts appearance signals the return of the forgotten or repressed past. Aleida
Assmanns distinction between spirits and ghosts helps to illuminate the dynamics
of this disruptive modality of haunting memory: while spirits, conjured up and
intentionally addressed, symbolize conscious recall or desired memory, ghosts stand
for involuntary or counter-voluntary memory.
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Memory as haunting
Ghostsrepresent something that returns from the past or the realm of the dead
on its own will. This return is the symptom of a deep crisis; it is felt as a violent
and threatening interruption of the present. Something that had been deemed
overcome and gone reappears to announce some unfinished business that needs
to be addressed (Assmann, 2011:1).
The ghost is thus an interruption or disruption that paradoxically testifies to
continuity with the past over which one has little control (Brogan, 1998:9). The
emphasis placed on the problem of warped temporality associated with the apparition
of ghosts signals the need to question and revise the constructions of memory which
cause the repression in the first place. Since the past cannot be simply forgotten and
rejected, it is the present that has to be problematized or transformed. It is precisely
this unsettling property of the ghost, directed against the stability of the present, that
allows it to be identified not only, as Derrida would say, as a figure of anachrony
(that is, warped temporality), but also as a figure of displacement (Peeren, 2007;
Wolfreys, 2002). Haunting, as the Freudian metaphor of the haunted house (Freud,
2003) teaches us, always brings with it a disruption of space in which the haunted
feels safe and at home.
The instances of haunting analyzed by scholars such as Avery Gordon, Alexander
Etkind, Renee Bergland and Kathleen Brogan, who in different ways reintroduce the
figure of the ghost into the field of studies on cultural memory,3 allow the encounter
with a ghost to be understood in terms of a collective or communitarian, rather than
subjective, event (Bergland, 2000; Brogan, 1998; Etkind, 2009; Gordon, 2008). The
ghost, still understood as a medium of troubled, repressed, silenced or forgotten past,
is transferred here from the realm of individual memory to that of collective and
shared constructions of the past. As Kathleen Brogan notes, in contemporary ghost
stories, the individuals or familys haunting clearly reflects the crises of a larger
social group (1998:2). Haunting, even if experienced in solitude, marks the moment
of a confrontation with the cultural history of a group to which the haunted belongs
(or sometimes does not). Thus, from this perspective, the ghost, linked to collective
histories of various communities and groups, is to be understood as a social (Avery
Gordon), communal (Kathleen Brogan), or public (Renee Bergland) figure. It is a
symbol of the entanglement of an individuals life in the sociopolitical structures
by which it is created (and haunted) (Butler, 2006:27) and, at the same time, a
passageway to problematic, marginalized, lost, erased or threatened constructions
of the past. Providing a platform through which that marginalized, denied, lost or
repressed history can be heard, regained and reappropriated is the first (descriptive
or informative) function of a ghost or ghost story. To quote Brogan again: To be
hauntedis to knowhow specific cultural memories that seem to have disappeared
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Zuzanna Dziuban
in fact refuse to be buried and still shape the present, in desirable and in troubling
ways (1998:16).
The identification of various instances of social and political violencesuch as the
experience of colonization, life under military dictatorship or state terror, the condition
of social and cultural exclusion, forced disappearance and violence inflicted upon
indigenous peoplesas, to slightly paraphrase Alexander Etkind, fertile grounds for
ghost-making (2009:186) closely links memory as haunting to post-catastrophic
memory (Etkind, 2009:196). Yet, in my opinion, it is a mistake to attempt to equate
the two types of memory. Violence that brings ghosts to life and produces the haunting
effects of memory is, according to Avery Gordon, violence that has caused suffering
which is unacknowledged, not recognized and, very often, denied. That condition is
definitely not applicable to all forms of post-catastrophic memory. Therefore, ghost
stories testify not only to the losses suffered by a community or minority group, but
also to their marginalization or the inadequacy of existing practices of memory to give
justice to their profoundness or scale. For that reason, the second critical function of
a ghost is to voice resistance, to address the problem of misrepresentations and denial
inscribed in official interpretations of the past and, by doing so, provide alternatives to
official versions of history. Sasha Handley (2007) points out that this identification of
the ghost story with alternative historyalternative to dominant, hegemonic, official
constructions of memoryinvests the ghost with emancipatory potential.
Renee Bergland, however, points out the possible limits to that emancipatory
potential. In The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, where she
analyzes the close connection between ghosts and constructions of national identity,
Bergland (2000:3) draws our attention to the intrinsic ambivalence of the figure of
the ghost. Another manifestation of the ubiquitous cultural rhetoric of haunting,
Bergland explains, is deployment of the figure of a ghost for nationalist purposes, that
is, the metaphorical spectralization of certain groups of citizens as a means of their
exclusion from national communityhere represented by the popularity of literary
representation of native Americans as ghosts. According to Bergland, then, the ghost
functions not only as a figure of resistance, but also as a symbol of defeat: the fact that
the ghost returns as a ghost testifies to the success of conquest, hegemonic repression
or marginalization. The dynamic relation between haunting as critical practice and
ghosting or spectralization (understood in terms of exclusion or denial) clearly shows
that counternationalist and emancipatory uses of ghosts can be easily absorbed and
reused by nationalist stories. Yet, as Bergland notes: The practice of representing
Indians as ghosts works both to establish American nationhood and to call it into
question (2000:5). Thus, even when used for nationalist purposes, the presence of
ghost stories always signals and directs attention to the fragility of constructions of
exclusive cultural identity.
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Memory as haunting
The third and most important transformative function of a ghost story is associated
with its ability to bring about the revision of collective constructions of memory and,
consequently, of group identity. However, the confrontation with and reintegration
into the present of the specters of repressed or forgotten cultural legacies is not an
easy task. According to Gordon and Brogan, ghost stories as vehicles of repressed
memory themselves have the potential to be traumatizing. In ghost stories analyzed
by both authors (for instance, Toni Morrisons Beloved, Luisa Valenzuelas He who
Searches, or Louise Erdrichs Tracks), the encounter with a specter often takes the
form of possession in its initial phase. In line with Alexander Etkinds analysis, the
main difference between other vehicles of cultural memorythat is, the hardware
of monuments and memorials and the software of textsand instances of haunting,
which he calls ghostware (2009:193), is the uncanny and frightening character of
the latter form of memory. The need to confront tragic and disturbing accounts of past
violence, which the appearance of the ghost signals and facilitates, is unsettling. That
is, of course, one of the main reasons why such memories are so often represented
through the threatening rhetoric of haunting. Another reason could have to do with the
imaginative dimension of ghosts. As Brogan points out:
The turn to the supernatural in the process of recovering history emphasizes the
difficulty of gaining access to a lost or denied past, as well as the degree to which
any such historical reconstruction is essentially an imaginative act (1998:6).
Thus, the presence of the ghost testifies that other means of representing and doing
justice to past tragedies or wrongdoings have failed or were insufficient: there is still
something-to-be-done (Gordon, 2008:205).
The incorporation or reintegration of disturbing memories, represented by ghosts,
into the fabric of cultural memory is therefore understoodby both Brogan and
Etkindas a process of its re-description or transformation. Identification of that
transformative process with the acts or rituals of mourning, including those performed
in texts, literature, film and art, acknowledges the importance of collective memory
practices in the production of cultural identities. On the other hand, the emphasis
that both scholars place on the need to reintegrate the ghost into the constructions
of collective identity, which cannot be equated with getting rid of them and once
and for all putting them to rest (the Freudian model), signals the advent of the new
spectral turn. To reintegrate the ghost as ghost into the fabric of cultural memory is
to acknowledge its presence as a legitimate and important element of cultural imagery
and vocabulary. That is, naturally, only one way to interpret and follow Derridas
postulate to learn to live with ghosts (1994:xviixviii).
More importantly, the reintegration of the ghost can also be conceived as a
deconstructive practice aimed at unveiling, destabilizing and transforming the conditions
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that have enabled specific instances of hegemonic (mnemonic) marginalization and

repression, and, as a consequence, the proliferation of contemporary ghosts. Avery
Gordon states:
It is sometimes about writing ghost stories, stories that not only repair
representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under
which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for
the future (2008:22).
I will now go on to analyze a specific context in which those two dimensions of
the presence of ghostdiscursive (imaginative) and deconstructivemeet in
a particularly fascinating and troubling way: the Holocaust-haunted world of
contemporary Warsaw.
The figure of ghost in the Holocaust-haunted world

The rhetoric of haunting is omnipresent in recent Polish academic reflection on World
War II and, most of all, on the Holocaust.4 As Polish Holocaust researcher Jolanta
Ambrosewicz-Jacobs puts it, We are still living in a world surrounded by the shadow of
the Holocaust, in a world with the ghosts of the Holocaust surrounding us (2011:187).
Jan Tomasz Gross describes the work of an historian dealing with the legacy of the war
and the immediate post-war period as an attempt to exorcise ghosts, which, he claims,
ruined the lives of our parents generation (2001b: Dedication) and threaten to ruin
our own.5 Zygmunt Bauman (2008) calls the contemporary world a Holocaust-haunted
world, that is, a world constitutively shaped and scarred by the Holocaust. However,
while for Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, the presence of the specter of the Holocaust reflects a
genuine need to remember the most inhuman event in the history of humanity, Grosss
and Baumans uses of the rhetoric of haunting point to a more complex and critical
approach toward the posthumous life of the Holocaust in the contemporary world. It is
hard to imagine the world with no inherent capacity for a new holocaust. This is what I
mean by saying that the world is haunted by the ghost of the Holocaust, notes Bauman
(2008:271). Thus, for Bauman and Gross alike, the ghost of the Holocaust is not exactly
one of the past: the possibility that violence, which it symbolizes, could be committed
again is constitutively inscribed in the characteristics of the Holocaust-haunted world.
The constant effort to reflect on the conditions that made the Holocaust possible and,
at the same time, on the impact it has on those who were affected by or involved in
it, is perceived as the only way to exorcise the ghost of the Holocausta ghost which
is obviously not one. After all, as Bauman (2008) legitimately points out, Holocaust
haunting afflicts and torments the perpetrators societies in a different way than it does
those of victims or bystandersif the latter term still applies.6
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The unique position of Poland on the map of the Holocaust-haunted world is, of
course, very much due to the fact that the Holocaust, for the most part, took place on
Polish soil. Poles were, as a result, the prime witnesses of both the mass murder of
3,000,000 of their fellow citizens and the attempted destruction of European Jewry
(Steinlauf, 1997). Yet, the Holocaust, which literally and metaphorically transformed
Poland into a Jewish graveyard, taking the lives of 90% of Polish Jews, was, as Jan
Tomasz Gross (2001b) points out, intrinsically intertwined with (non-Jewish) Polish
experiences of the war. Significantly shaped by the normalization of anti-Jewish bias
(Meng, 2011:18) in pre-war Poland, the attitudes and actions of many Poles towards
their Jewish neighbors (and Nazi anti-Semitic policies) can hardly be described in
terms of passivity or neutrality. Therefore, the legacy of the Holocaust for Poles
has been an extremely problematic one. The indifference of most of Polish society to
the crimes committed before their eyes; the lack of an outright response to it on the part
of the Polish underground state; the low social approval for saving Jews; the reported
instances of collaboration with the Germans and, more importantly, the acts of violence
directed against Jews; and, finally, the fact that, after the war, Poles found themselves
beneficiaries of the Holocaust (e.g., by taking over Jewish property)all contribute
to the burden of guilt inscribed in the memory of the Holocaust in Poland (see, e.g.,
Engelking, 2003; Forecki, 2010; Grabowski, 2004; Gross, 2001a, 2006; Steinlauf,
1997). Moreover, in the immediate post-war years, the memory of the Holocaust was
carefully separated from both heroic and martyrological Polish narratives of war,
and consequently, it was forgotten or erased. The 3,000,000 Polish citizens who fell
victim to Nazi genocide were neither mourned nor remembered. Also, the fact that
Polish anti-Semitism survived the war almost intact and persists until today adds,
in a very unsettling way, to the complexity of Polish perceptions of that not fully
witnessed [and definitely not yet reworked] event (Steinlauf, 1997:54)something
to which the ubiquity of metaphors of haunting in post-1989 Polish academic debates
on the memory of the Holocaust clearly testifies. The extensive research on Polish
involvement in the Holocaust undertaken in the last two decades by Polish scholars,
together with many efforts to officially commemorate the tragedy of Polish Jews, can
be seen as modes of wrestling with the ghost of the Holocaust.
It is precisely within the broad and complex context of Polish experience and
response to the Holocaust that I would like to locate my reflections on the concept
of haunting. The basis of my reflection is the discovery that the last decade has
brought about a noticeable proliferation of actual, real and imaginary JewishPolish ghosts (that is, Jewish ghosts haunting Poles). More and more often, these
emerge on the margins of Polish theoretical debates on the Holocaust, testifying to the
indispensability and, at the same time, insufficiency of those debates for exorcising
the ghost of the Holocaust. Rather than consider the meanings of the metaphors of
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haunting discussed in the Polish debates on the Holocaust, I ask whether an analysis
of ghost stories and reported instances of haunting of Poles by Jewish ghosts, both in
literature and popular belief, can problematize or transform the way we think about
Polish Holocaust-haunted memory. At the same time, this question can be seen as
an effort to inquire into the ways in which such ghostly encounters can contribute to
existing theoretical approaches to haunting or, put differently, how the effort to wrestle
with the Polish ghost of the Holocaust can be translated into a more general process
of learning to live with the ghost. In order to answer these questions, I concentrate on
a very specific spatio-temporality of the presence of ghost: the Muranw district in
Warsaw, which in itself can be conceived as an instance of Etkinds ghostwarea
space as a medium of haunting memory and, at the same time, a prism through which
one can analyze Polish Holocaust-haunted memory.
Hauntedghosted: Polish-Jewish encounters in contemporary Warsaw

In 2011, a local branch of a large commercial TV station, TVN Warszawa, showed
a short quasi-documentary entitled The Secrets of Muranw. The documentary was
part of a broader series called Doomed Districts, which examined paranormal and
unexplained activities and events taking place in various parts of Poland. The episode
The Secrets of Muranw presented disturbing accounts of haunting experienced
by the inhabitants of a particular doomed neighborhood: Muranw, a residential
district in Warsaw and the location of the Jewish ghetto between 1940 and 1943.
presentingin all seriousness and set against an appropriate background score
numerous examples of the paranormal events to which the inhabitants of Muranw
constantly fall victim. Among these experiences were the sense of a presence,
hearing strange noises or footsteps, a lack of control over electronic devices and selfmoving furniture. The interviewees, some of whom preferred to remain anonymous,
described their encounters with these definitely non-figurative ghosts, as well as their
sometimes very strong emotional responses.
The sense of the presence of a third, invisible person in the room caused acute panic
attacks, unexplained fears and sudden awakenings in the middle of the night. Some of
the interviewees in the documentary admitted that frequent exposure to such events
had forced them, or their acquaintances, to move out of Muranw and search for
other places to live. Others, who confessed to an uncanny feeling of guilt associated
with the haunting, turned to specialists for help; that is, they consulted people who
professionally communicate with the dead: a medium or dowser. All the haunted
inhabitants of Muranwthose who decided to move out and those who decided to stay
and fightdirectly connected their experiences of haunting to the areas Jewish history.
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Memory as haunting
The ghost of a rabbi, said to have paid frequent visits to various residents of Muranw,
until finally exorcised by a medium, seemed to function as the most powerful symbol
of that history. One guest invited to the program, the head of the Polish Psychotronic
Society, gave professional advice on how to react to the terrible phenomena which
can happen to every inhabitant of Muranw. Her response was simple: to learn more
about the history of the place, explore the Jewish past that haunts it and then ask the
ghost what he or she needs, in other words, what is to be done.
This documentary could be mocked and treated as an instance of sensation-seeking
entertainment, if it were not for other reportssome based on academic researchon
the widespread belief in ghosts among the inhabitants of Muranw. For instance, the
authors of an ethnographic research report ordered in 2005 by the emerging Museum
of the History of Polish Jews refer, with certain reserve, to various instances of
haunting described by their respondents. The report, conducted under the supervision
of well-known Polish environmental sociologist Maria Lewicka, was released in 2007
(Lewicka et al., 2007; see also Lewicka, Wjcik and Bilewicz, 2010). It describes a
frequent feeling of unexplained guilt, fear and uncanniness (Lewicka et al., 2007:27)
experienced by the residents of Muranw; once again, the residents see this as being
directly linked to the Jewish past of the district.
An analogous point is made by Audrey Mallet, a French historian working on the
memory of Muranw district: Most of the people I talked to had a ghost story to
tell me about (2011:81). She even retells one story, citing an urban legend about a
skyscraper on Bankowy Square, the blue building. Erected on the spot where the
Great Synagogue had been located, this building is said to be haunted by the ghost of
a rabbi. This nineteenth-century synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis on May 16,
1943, the day that symbolizes the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and
the destruction of the ghetto. The plan to build the skyscraper was made as early as
the 1950s, and construction started in 1976. The tower was not completed until the
beginning of the 1990s, however. As Mallet explains: It took the builders fifteen
years to finish the tower, and local superstition holds that the delay was due to a
curse put by the former rabbi of the Synagogue (2011:79). One can conclude that the
figure of the ghost is intrinsically inscribed in the spatial imagery of Muranw.7 It is
worth noting that, a couple of years ago, the lower floors of the blue building were
reconstructed and now their shape mirrors the contours of the destroyed synagogue.
This year, on the seventieth anniversary of its destruction, a wooden reconstruction
was unveiled on Solidarity Alley.
Clearly, there is more to this than the simple fact that Muranw is located in the
area of the city where the ghetto used to be. The post-war history of the memory of
the district is also significant and has to be addressed. Before 1939, Muranw was the
center of Jewish life in Warsaw. It was transformed into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940
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and went on to be totally destroyed during the war (Engelking and Leociak, 2009).
After the end of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in May 1943, German officials decided
to burn and raze the remaining buildings at the site. The entire pre-war Jewish district
was flattened. In 1945, Muranw was just a heap of rubble; only a few buildings
from the former Jewish district remained. As Lewicka and colleagues explain, Polish
officials, urban planners and architects decided not to
rebuild the district in its pre-war form, as it was not in accordance with modern
socialist architecture. Because of the total destruction of pre-war Muranw, the
avant-garde architects had a unique opportunity to shape and rebuild the district
The historic reconstruction programunder the leadership of architect Jan
Zachwatowicz and aimed at rebuilding large parts of the center of the martyr city,
as Warsaw was then nameddid not include Muranw: the Jewish district was not
thought to be a valuable part of Polish heritage. On the contrary, the presence of the
material traces of the former sealed district recalled the failure of Poles to properly
address Jewish suffering during the war, a memory not easy to confront and therefore
marginalized and repressed. Nonetheless, the ruins of the former ghetto, consisting of
to clear the vast terrain would have been too expensive. Consequently, the bodies of
the perished ghetto inhabitants were never exhumed. Only two intentional memorials
were erected in the terrain of the former sealed district: Leon Marek Suzins 1946
temporary monument to the Ghetto Fighters and the famous Natan Rappaports Ghetto
Uprising Monument, which was unveiled in April 1948 (Young, 1993:155184).
The task of designing the district anew was given to architect Bohdan Lachert, who,
following the guidelines of urban modernism, decided to transform Muranw into a
functional housing complex for the working class. Geometrically square apartment
buildings were to be located amid vast green areas. Yet, in a paradoxical way, Lacherts
project also sought to commemorate the tragedy of the Polish Jews. The housing
complex was to be built, literally and symbolically, on the ruins of the former ghetto,
thus testifying to the possibility of creating new life on the ruins of the past. As a
result, those apartments built according to Lacherts plan are still located on little hills
composed of rubble and concrete from the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. Moreover,
the crushed-brick concrete used to construct the blocks of apartments was extracted
from the bricks found on the territory of the former closed area. The houses designed
by Lachert are thus made of rusty, dark-red bricks, intended never to be plastered,
and conceived by the architect as a symbol of Jewish suffering. (Some years after
the housing estate was completed, its inhabitants pleaded for changes: the buildings
were painted and decorated.) Lacherts project was abandoned in 1950, along with the
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idea to commemorate the Jewish past of the district. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of
southern Muranw, the only part of the district built according to the architects plan,
literally live on ashes and human remains. Other than this, the present urban shape of
Muranw does not recall its pre-war past at all; even the names and, in some cases,
locations of the streets were changed (for instance, the famous Nalewki Street). For
many years, the Jewish past and the memory of Jewish inhabitants were totally erased
from Muranw district, and from Warsaw in general. The landscape of the post-war
capital was intended to reflect the homogenous makeup of its inhabitants, marked
by monuments to the heroism of Varsovians during the war. As Michael Meng points
out, Warsaw became a city of carefully constructed temporal markers that narrated
Polands wartime suffering and postwar redemption (2011:108). Not much space
remained for the commemoration of Jewish suffering.
The first efforts to spatially memorialize Jewish history in Muranw were undertaken
in the 1980s. In 1988, the Umschlagplatz Monument was unveiled, marking the place
from which the inhabitants of the ghetto were deported to the extermination camp in
was conceived as part of the Memorial Route of Jewish Struggle and Martyrdom,
which comprises 22 symbolic tombstones and plaques for insurgents who fought in
insurgents, Mordechaj Anielewicz committed suicide on May 8, 1943was secured

and a new obelisk, designed by Hanna Szmalenberg and Marek Moderau, was added.
In 2008, Eleonora Bergman, director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and
architect Tomasz Lec introduced the idea of marking the outline of the ghetto wall in
the urban fabric of Warsaw: more than 20 plaques with the inscription Ghetto Wall
19401943, written in both Polish and English, were installed. Finally, on April 19,
2014, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened to the public. At the
same time, one can also refer to numerous grassroots and artistic initiatives aimed at
demarginalizing the memory of the pre-war Jewish neighborhood and at inscribing it
into the cultural landscape of Muranw. The annual Singers Warsaw Jewish festival
(organized since 2004); the non-profit initiative Muranw Station popularizing the
knowledge of Muranw Jewish history (see http://www.stacjamuranow.art.pl); the
houses in Muranw steaming from pre-war timesall work, more or less critically,
towards the recovery of the districts Jewish past. 8
All these official and bottom-up efforts to commemorate and re-inscribe Jewish
presence and war-time suffering into the landscape of Muranw have not put a stop
to the belief in ghosts among the inhabitants of the neighborhood. On the contrary,
the knowledge that the residents of the doomed neighborhood have gained, thanks
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to official attempts to commemorate its Jewish past, contributes to the proliferation

of Jewish ghosts. The very knowledge of the existence of the haunting invisible
metropolis (Zaborowska, 2004:100) or of the fact that a great cemetery lies under
modern blocks of apartments, built upon ashes and human remains, unsettles
the experience of the inhabited space and renders Jewish ghosts all the more real.
Moreover, according to Maria Lewickas report, it is precisely the absence of any
material vestiges from the pre-war period in the landscape of Muranw that most
inspires the imagination of its inhabitants and brings about the uncanny images of
what could be found beneath the surface of Muranw (Lewicka et al., 2007:26). The
ubiquity of ghosts in Muranwimaginatively filling the gap between pre-war and
post-war maps of the district, or its pre-war and post-war topographyhas as much to
do with the marginalized and erased memory of the Jewish past as with actual Jewish
suffering during World War II. As in Brogans interpretation of haunting, the recovery
of the erased Jewish past is doomed to be a ghost-producing, imaginative act.
Interestingly, the two most important Polish historians of the sealed district of
Warsaw, Jacek Leociak and Barbara Engelking, also operationalize haunting metaphors
to reflect upon Muranw as the post-ghetto space (Engelking and Leociak, 2009).
This term, coined by Leociak (2001:85), aims to emphasize the radical differencean
architectural and topographical incompatibilitybetween the ghetto and the present
space, which is deprived of all material traces of its past and is therefore experienced
as a peculiar warping of vision, brought on by a ghostly interplay between visibility
and invisibility. As Leociak writes, the doubling of perspective inscribed in presentday perceptions of the former sealed area involves seeing what we do not see behind
the veil of the present-day urban landscape of Muranw (2013:837). Engelking and
Leociak describe their book, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, as
a guide to the spectral Warsaw, which readers must themselves reconstruct and
compare with the Warsaw of today. If they want to, they will meet there the
shadows of the Jews of Warsaw. Behind the screen of the houses and streets of
contemporary Muranw, their hidden presence will make itself felt (2013:11).
And it does, indeed. Yet, among some of the inhabitants of the districtdefinitely
not in accordance with Engelking and Leociaks intentionsit causes, above all, a
sense of displacement or a loss of control over the space that is their home, a feeling
of guilt, and a fear of being judged for living in the post-ghetto space. According to
Muranw Station, a monograph dedicated to the prewar and post-war history of the district, the presence of the Museum of the History of
Polish Jews and the international tourists visiting it can only radicalize the unsettling,
anxiety-generating process of blurring the boundaries between our Muranw and
the Jewish space (2012:340).
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Memory as haunting
Reghosting as critical practice

It is exactly this problem of the ownership of Muranw that is confronted, in a
very interesting way, by contemporary Polish literature. Elaborating on the unresolved
tension between the official politics of memory in Poland and the fears inscribed into
popular belief in ghosts, authors such as Sylwia Chutnik (2011)9 and Igor Ostachowicz
(2012) undertake the task of translating the unsettling experiences of the inhabitants
of the district into a form of critical cultural intervention. Described by Magdalena
Waligrska (Forthcoming) as traumatic surrealism, their attempts to invest the ghost
stories of Muranw with a critical and transformative function are connected to an
intentional effort to recover the landscape of Muranw for the ghosts of its former
inhabitants, radically blurring the boundaries between theirs and ours. Thus, the
literal reghosting, that is, repopulating of the landscape of Muranw with Jewish ghosts,
goes beyond a mere re-description of the spatial imagery and memory of the postghetto space. Chutnik and Ostachowicz aim to demarginalize both the Jewish past
of the district and the figure of the ghost itself, depicting Muranw as an imaginary
battlefield: a space of a critical, but also therapeutic, encounter between the not yet
fully worked through Jewish legacy and haunted Polishness. The symbolical restoration
of justice can be seen as one of the most important objectives of the works analyzed
herein (Waligrska, Forthcoming). At the same time, they problematize the redemptive
dimension of official commemorative practices of the state, which can be seen as a
premature celebration of the ingestion of the difficult Polish-Jewish past by Poland.
In Muranooo, a short story written in 2011 and adapted shortly thereafter into
a theater screenplay, Sylwia Chutnik depicts the life of the residents of a severely
haunted block of apartments in Muranw. A tragi-comedy, Muranooo was inspired
by the numerous accounts of haunting reported by inhabitants of the district and
the above-mentioned quasi-documentary, The Secrets of Muranw.10 The encounter
between real Poles and spectral Jews, triggered by a visit of Polish residents of
the building to the basement in search of Jewish valuables potentially hidden there,
is at first threatening. It all ends happily, however, when the Poles learn to recognize
the Jewish ghosts not as vengeful creatures yearning to regain their property and
appropriate urban space, but as precarious, vulnerable beings who return to their
homes in search of the simple pleasures of everyday life. What the Jewish ghosts
want, we learn from Muranooo, is not revenge on Poles, or more monuments
commemorating their tragic death, but that we start to enjoy the simple pleasures in
their name. In Chutniks story, the imaginative re-description of the meaning of the
Jewishness of the ghosts, evident in the change of attitude of the Poles towards their
threatening, uninvited guests, leads to a parallel critical re-description of a Polishness
still based on anti-Jewish sentiments. Associating the presence of Jewish ghosts in
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the urban landscape of Muranw with fear of the Jews and absurd prejudices against
Bakir, 2004), Chutniks story provides a critical commentary on the reasons behind
the propagation of contemporary Jewish ghosts. Fear of the Jew as the threatening
other (Michlic, 2006), closely linked with the old myth of Jewish conspiracy, ritual
murder and blood libel, is here conceived as part of the legacy of Polish anti-Semitism.
Thus, in Muranooo, learning to live with the Jewish ghosts is primarily equated
with exorcising the destructive ghost of Polish anti-Semitism.
An analogous point is made by another Polish writer, Igor Ostachowicz, author of
The Night of the Living Jews (2012).11 Much less optimistic than Muranooo, this
bookwhich, as it title suggests, could also easily be classified as a tragi-comic horror
storycan at the same time be read as a critical pamphlet about the dark side of Polish
memory politics and past- and present-day Polish anti-Semitism. Aimed both at antiJewish sentiments and at the superficiality of contemporary philosemitism without
Jews (Wiszniewicz, 1997), Ostachowiczs novel elaborates on the phantasmatic
character of the image of a Jew inscribed in both pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish cultural
imagery in Poland, which is an obvious consequence of the marginalization and
consequent erasure of the Jewish past from constructions of Polish collective memory.
The setting of the action of the novel, contemporary Muranw, is established as the
perfect context for asking how Poles would react if the Jews really were to come back
to Poland, even if only as the undead.
In this perverse way, Ostachowicz contributes to the debate triggered by Yael
Bartanas project, And Europe will be Stunned, which supports the movement for
a Jewish Renaissance in contemporary Poland.12 Ostachowiczs The Night of the
Living Jews translates the Polish Jews right to return, along with the repressed
memory of their suffering, into pop-cultural imagery, and, in doing so, it elaborates
upon popular belief in Jewish ghosts. In the novel we read that
evil cannot be covered up with debris and soil, the suffering has to be respected
and accounted for, and blood, if it is not cleaned in time and is allowed to soak
into the ground, mixed with dust, will arise one day as a horde of golems slow
like tanks, and broken bones and maltreated bodies will cover themselves with
the few rags which were not stolen from them, by means of sub-biological forces
they will cobble themselves together into bipedal monsters who only know pain,
and they will share the pain, running from door to door of our calm apartments
(Ostachowicz, 2012:41).
And so the Jews do return, but instead of a horde of golems or monsters, the Jewish
undead turn out, just as in Chutniks story, to be normal peoplea little bit lost
perhaps, but looking, like everyone else, to live a simple, enjoyable life.
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Memory as haunting
Nonetheless, the Jewish return depicted by Ostachowicz in his novel is not an

easy one. The presence of Living Jews in the landscape of contemporary Warsaw
provokes a radicalization of anti-Jewish sentiment and an outburst of violence against
the Jewish corpses threatening living Poles. Mass mobilization of right-wing
enthusiasts, nationalists and so-called patriots, hoping to get rid of the Jewish ghosts,
eventually leads to a final battle between furious masses and a small group of Poles
defending the Living Jews. The battle, in which Satan himself is involved, takes
place in the everyday setting of the Arcadia shopping mall in Muranw. The eventual
victory of Jew-protectors over nationalistshere ironically equated with the victory
of good over evilis also paradoxical. While the Living Jews are able to blend into
the crowd of ordinary Varsovians, the main protagonist of the novel, an uncomplicated
Polish tile layer who underwent a radical transformation from indifferent conformist
to committed defender of the Jewish cause, has to pay with his life for his solidarity
with the Jews.
This radical revision of the Polish myth of heroism and victimhood in terms of a
fight against Polish nationalism and anti-Semitism in the name of a more inclusive
Polandthat is, the struggle of Poles with themselvespoints to the transformative
dimension of the presence of Jewish ghosts. Making room for the memory of the
marginalized, excluded minority and the suffering that it had to endure, also at the
hands of Poles, must involve, above all, an effort to deconstruct national myths, blur
the boundaries of exclusive Polishness and adopt a more critical approach towards
Polish-Jewish history. Thus, if wrestling with the Polish ghost of the Holocaust means
learning to live with Jewish ghosts, then there is still a lot to be done, as The Night of
the Living Jews clearly suggests.
Conclusion
No single narrative can embrace the complexity of Polish responses to the
Holocaust and the Polish-Jewish past. However, the language of hauntingin both
its imaginative and deconstructive dimensionproves productive in exploring the
ambivalent nature of these responses. The figure of the Jewish ghost, itself profoundly
ambivalent, functions as a symbol of repression or marginalization of memory of
Polands Jewish inhabitants and an entry to this erased and forgotten past. It allows
creative space to address the problem of misrepresentation and denial, as is prevalent
in Polish politics of memory after 1945, as well as present-day critical efforts to repair
those representational mistakes. Thus, two features underlie the presented vision of
contemporary Polishness haunted by its Polish-Jewish past: ghosting as mnemonic
marginalization and exclusion, and re-ghosting as critical practice aimed at a
deconstructive reading of exclusive constructions of memory and identity. Moreover,
129
Zuzanna Dziuban
it is precisely this recognition of the interdependence of ghosting and haunting

experienced after all as a troubling confrontation with an erased or marginalized
pastwhich enables an interpretation of this experience not only as potentially
critical or transformative, but also as an ethical, future-oriented act. It is not sufficient
to acknowledge past damage that cannot be undone: learning to live with the ghosts
means rather a constant effort to translate ones own guilt or fear into a desire for a
second chance (Stuart, 2006:7), even if this inevitably comes too late.
NOTES
1
I wish to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which generously

supported this research.
Interestingly, it was the political dimension of Derridas interpretation of the ghost,

as proposed in The Specters of Marx, that provoked the harshest critique of many
influential contemporary political thinkers. The naivety or abstract character of
Derridas interpretations of the legacy of Marx, reflected in the assumed emptiness
of the figure of the specter, were pointed out by contributors of the volume Ghostly
Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx (see, e.g.,
Eagleton, 2008; Macherey, 2008; Negri, 2008). An analogous point is made in
Popular Ghosts (del Pilar Blanco and Peeren, 2010:xix).
Instead of invoking or critically contributing to the existing, already very intense,

scholarly debates on the highly contested notions of collective and cultural memory,
I employ, for the purposes of this paper, a broad understanding of the concept of
cultural memory as a set of culturally framed and politically constrained performative
representations and practices referring to the past, both individual and collective.
I hope that the premises for this kind of understanding of the concept of cultural
memory, which aims against reinforcement of the problematic distinctions between
individual and collective, private and public, personal and political, socio-political
and cultural, are or soon will be clear to the readers of this text.
This statement could also easily be attributed to non-Polish reflections on the

Holocaust and its aftermath, such as Ruth Klgers (2001) Still Alive: A Holocaust
Girlhood Remembered or Aleida Assmanns (2011) interpretations of Christian
Boltanskis art.
An illuminating interpretation of the importance and meaning of the metaphor of the

ghost in Gross writing can be found in Shore (2005).
130
Memory as haunting
I am referring here to the question posed at the conference Being the Witness
of the Holocaust, organized in Warsaw in April 2013 and debated during the
conference panel What is left of Hilbergs PerpetratorsVictimsBystanders
Warsaw. Jan Tomasz Gross, whose Neighbors (2001a) significantly contributed to
the problematization of the perception of Poles as mere bystanders not involved in
the violence directed against the Jews, was one of the participants in that debate.
The memoirs of Jews returning to Warsaw after the war to encounter their destroyed
homes and totally devastated ghetto area are also full of ghost stories. However, an
interpretation of those haunted narratives, which definitely deserve critical attention,
would be beyond the scope of this paper.
Janicka (2012), Majewski (2012), Mallet (2011) and Meng (2011).
The author is indebted to Magdalena Waligrska for providing her with the
manuscript.
10
The play based on Chutniks short story was performed in 2012 at the Teatr
Dramatyczny in Warsaw and the Theatre Ensemble in Tel Aviv. Israeli artist Lilach
Dekel-Avner directed it.
11
A short horror movie with the same title, written and directed by Oliver Noble, was
released in the US in 2008. Yet, since the plot of Ostachowiczs book bears little
resemblance to that of the movie, I assume that the author of the Polish Night of the
Living Jews was not directly inspired by Nobles film. I would like to thank Kobi
Kabalek for directing my attention to this uncanny coincidence.
12
The project And Europe Will be Stunned is conceived as an incentive to and expression
of activities of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, an initiative of young
Jews and Poles calling for a return of Jewish life to contemporary Poland. The
project was initiated in 2007 by the production of a short artistic movie Nightmares
(first part of a trilogy entitled And Europe Will be Stunned), in which 3,300,000
Jews were summoned to return to Poland in order, among other things, to exorcise
xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes of its inhabitants.
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The Bedouin-Arab historical memory:

Documenting the silenced voices of the margins1
SAFA ABURABIA
We took the children there because we want them to experience the hope. We took
our children there so that they know that they had land. They should know where
they came from because every person must know these things. The idea is for
them to know their history and that they possessed land (Abu-Shareb).
This is not the first time he has recounted our history; he was the one who told it
to us all the time. He unfolded the history in each event to explain why we have a
problem in Laqiya nowadays (Abu-Siyam).
As these remarks indicate, the Bedouin-Arab narrative is land-based. The land defines
their ancestry along three time-based alignments: the past, which refers to who they
are and where they were born; the present, which describes the struggle for their land
and territorial culture; and the future, which derives from the past and the present and
anchors their hope for physical and cognitive return to their land and their desire to
relive their past lives.
The historical discourse of the Bedouin Arab is taking a powerful and vibrant place
within their society in the Negev. By recounting their past and telling their history,
visiting their ancestors land and identifying relics from that period, demarcating sites
and actively hand down the story to the younger generations, they are reinforcing their
childrens affinity to their historic land and forming their essential territorial identity.
Documenting these historical voices of Bedouin Arabs in the Negev from the 1948
generation, and of their children, has powerful and significant consequences for their
historical discourse and for their struggle as the indigenous owners of the land. It
shows how land is the fundamental element that defines Bedouin Arabs, their values
and cultural anchors. These are the cornerstones of their land-based worldview, the
story of each Bedouin-Arab self, representing their affiliation and, in fact, their home.
Thus, the struggle for the return of the lost land, waged in the cognitive and physical
spheres and through a variety of spatial practices, is also the struggle for restoration
of cultural values that characterize Bedouin Arabs as a society and define that society
accordingly. These voices also create an alternative history that challenges how
hegemonic Zionist Israeli history in the academic and public sphere excludes them
The Bedouin-Arab historical memory
and ignores their cultural formation, which helps to represent them as illegal invaders
of Israeli lands.
Documenting the silenced voices of margin histories, and amplifying the voices of
the subordinate population, helps to reshape their identity in contexts such as sense
of place, empowerment and opposition. These voices contribute to changing the way
knowledge about the Bedouin Arabs in the Negev is created, by native scholars that
write from the bottom up, to understand their identity and cultural needs.
NOTE
1
This short text is based on the authors Masters thesis, Exiled in our homeland: The
diasporical identity of the Negev Bedouin, and Ph.D. dissertation, Out of history,
hidden voices within gender spaces: Bedouin-Arab women tell the Nakba. It is
based on in-depth interviews of men and women from the 1948 generation and their
children in the Negev, from recognized and unrecognized villages, who experienced
uprooting first hand and related their personal testimonies. Their memories of their
previous lives constitute the scientific basis for the documentation.
137

GUY BEINER
Capitals often tend to dominate national histories. The island of Ireland has been
mostly studied from the point of view of documents compiled and archived by a
central administration based in Dublin, or by higher echelons in London. This
metropolitan perspective, which has dominated modern Irish history, has lent itself
to a center-based conceptualization of Irish memory. Remembrance outside of the
greater Dublin area has been relegated to a peripheral status, commonly considered to
be derivative of the constructions of memory generated in the capital. Hence, memory
in the periphery is perceived as subordinate to memory in the center.
In some cases this approach may, with qualifications, seem to make sense, as in the
memory of the Easter Rising of 1916. This cornerstone of Irish national memory was
essentially a Dublin affair. The headquarters of the attempted insurrection were located
in the General Post Office in Dublin city center, nearly all the engagements took place
in the streets and in key buildings around the city, and the executions of the leaders,
who would be elevated into the pantheon of national martyrs, were held in Dublins
Kilmainham jail. The Easter Rising was subsequently construed as the inaugural event
of an Irish Revolution that resulted in partition and independence. Whereas memory
of 1916soon to be marked by centennial celebrationsis grounded in Dublin, a
better understanding of the complex relationships between periphery and memory
could benefit from an examination of another landmark in Irish history: the Great
Irish Rebellion of 1798. Far exceeding the limited scale of action in 1916, the 1798
rebellion stands out as the largest outburst of violence in late-modern Irish history.
Significantly, it featured a number of provincial insurrections, but had no substantial
presence in the capital.
Influenced by the American Revolution and inspired by the French Revolution,
the secret society of the United Irishmen devised, in the 1790s, a three-part plan
for a republican insurrection in Ireland. The rebellion was supposed to hinge on
a takeover of key points in Dublin city. This was to be followed by mobilization
of rebels in the surrounding areas, who were to march on the capital. Finally, the
uprising was to conclude with the ignition of risings around the country (Graham,
1996). Within the wider context of the Revolutionary Wars, the Irish rebellion was
to be backed by French military aid that would bring about the establishment of an
independent republic (Elliott, 1982). The arrival of a French expedition to Bantry Bay
in December 1796 and its dispersal by storms alerted the British authorities to the
danger of invasion. The implementation of rigorous counter-revolutionary actions in
1797 thwarted the original preparations and resulted in the arrest of the United Irish
leadership in early 1798.
When rebellion finally broke out in May 1798, the attempt to take Dublin resulted
in utter failure, and the stirrings in the cordon area around the city met with limited
success. Major rebellions subsequently erupted in three provincial arenas: the
southeast (principally in county Wexford and spilling out into neighboring areas, in
particular Wicklow), the west (from county Mayo, through Sligo and Leitrim, to county
Longford in the north-midlands) and the northeast (counties Antrim and Down). In
each of these theaters, the rebellion assumed a different character (Pakenham, 1997).
This variance generated distinct forms of provincial memory, which interacted in
very different ways with the hegemonic historical discourses that emanated from the
center. The diversity in the dynamics of memory and periphery can be illustrated by
briefly looking at the centennial celebrations of the rebellion, a time when memory of
1798 came to the fore of public life.
In 1898, the United Irish Rebellion was commemorated extensively throughout
Ireland and the Irish diaspora. All shades and hues of Irish nationalism were involved
in the commemorations, and a number of organizations and factions competed over
the management of the celebrations. By late spring, a central committee had been
formed in Dublin to coordinate the centenary and a massive demonstration in Dublin
was scheduled as the centerpiece of the anniversary (August 15, 1898). As part of
the build-up to this national event, the committee appealed to local communities to
organize provincial events and 98 Clubs were formed across the country. It would
therefore seem that commemoration assumed a top-down model, through which a
nationalist elite in Dublin dictated to the periphery how it should remember 1798
(Foster, 2001; OKeefe, 1988, 1992). In practice, centennial manifestations of
commemoration were multi-layered, as local communities had initiated preparations
several years in advance of the anniversary. The influences of ingrained regional
traditions of remembrance, which had developed over the century, conditioned the
ways in which the rebellion was commemorated in the periphery.
County Wexford in the eastern province of Leinster, where the rebels had enjoyed
a series of victories from May to mid-June before being defeated, had been the most
prominent arena of the rebellion in 1798. It was also notorious for the memory of
sectarian atrocities, in particular the massacre of Protestant captives by Catholic
rebels at Wexford town and Scullabogue, as well as indiscriminate killing of Catholic
populations by unrestrained loyalist forces. Contested interpretations of the rebellion
in Wexford were debated in political polemics throughout the nineteenth century.
The identification of the rebellion primarily with Wexford placed this location at
139
Guy Beiner
the core of 1798 memory (Whelan, 1996: 133-175; cf. Dunne, 2004). Accordingly,
the representation of this arena prevailed in the centennial program and the many
commemorative events held there were widely attended by nationalist dignitaries
arriving from Dublin and London. In the southeast, periphery functioned as center
and, to a large extent, dominated collective memory.
The western province of Connacht had seen a belated rebellion following the arrival
of a small French expeditionary force in the late summer of 1798. In mainstream
historiography, this arena of the rebellion was regarded as marginal in comparison to
Wexford. However, provincial communities sustained vivid folk memories through
transmission of oral traditions, which recalled The Year of the Frenchknown
in Irish as Bliain na bhFrancachas a central component of grass-roots historical
consciousness. Delegates from Dublin, who in 1898 visited county Mayo (where
the French had landed in August 1798) or county Longford (where the Franco-Irish
forces were defeated in September 1798), were obliged to adapt their commemorative
agenda to match local expectations. In the west, periphery challenged its neglect by
the center with a vibrant provincial social memory that demanded recognition in
national collective memory (Beiner, 2006).
In counties Antrim and Down in the northern province of Ulster, where the United Irish
rebels were predominantlythough not exclusivelyPresbyterians, the insurrection
had been quickly quelled in June 1798. Following its brutal suppression and the passing
of the Act of Union, which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
in 1800, Presbyterian communities that had been heavily implicated in republican
rebellion seemed to realign their politics and were seen to publicly embrace loyalism.
By the end of the nineteenth century, these counties were known as strongholds of
unionism and militant Orangeism. Consequently, the northern Presbyterian experience
of the 1798 rebellion was largely written out of historiography. Nevertheless, social
forgetting in Ulster did not result in total amnesia but in the persistence of local and
more private forms of remembrance concealed behind a veil of public silence. Efforts
by nationalists in Belfast to organize commemorations in 1898 provoked a violent
frenzy of de-commemoration, as riots broke out and martial law was proclaimed.
The northern periphery claimed its right to be excluded from the center. Iconoclastic
rituals of forgetting were enforced in public, while discreet traditions of remembrance
were accommodated in private, leaving the periphery outside of collective memory
(Beiner, 2013; McBride, 2003).
From this case study, it is possible to identify three modes of memory through which
the periphery can assert itself: collective memory (in which periphery is at the center
of memory), social memory (in which a marginalized periphery negotiates with the
center for recognition) and social forgetting (in which periphery purposely remains
outside of the center). Although these categories may prove to be useful for the study
140
of memory and periphery in general, the distinctions should not be overly schematic,
as aspects of these three modes of memory can often be identified alongside each
other (for further discussion, see Beiner, 2010).
REFERENCES
Beiner, Guy. (2006). Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social
Memory. Madison: Wisconsin University Press.
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remembrance in Ulster. History and Memory 25,1:950.
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Elliott, Marianne. (1982). Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Foster, Roy. (2001). Remembering 1798. In Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in
Modern Ireland (pp. 6794). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Wexford (pp. 6578). Dublin: Four Courts Press.
McBride, Ian. (2003). Memory and forgetting: Ulster Presbyterians and 1798. In
Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds.), 1798: A
Bicentenary Perspective (pp. 478496). Dublin: Four Courts Press.
OKeefe, Timothy. (1988). The 1898 efforts to celebrate the United Irishmen: The 98
centennial. ire-Ireland 23:5173.
. (1992). Who fears to speak of 98?: The rhetoric and rituals of the United Irishmen
centennial, 1898. ire-Ireland 27:6791.
Pakenham, Thomas. (1997). The Year of Liberty: The Story of the Great Irish Rebellion.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Whelan, Kevin. (1996). The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction
of Irish Identity 17601830. Cork: Cork University Press.
141

PETER CARRIER
There are few more poignant demonstrations of the role of memory in the formation
of periphery than Norbert Elias and John Scotsons study of people living in adjacent
suburban developments of the English town of Leicester in the late 1950s and early
1960s, as documented in the book The Established and the Outsiders (1965). In the
suburb, known by the fictive name of Winston Parva, new residents of recently built
houses were subject to gossip and therefore ostracized by residents who had already
lived in the suburb for two or three generations. The stock of common memories,
attachments and dislikes (Elias and Scotson, 1965:xxxvi-xxxvii) forged over time
by the exchange of information within the older group meant that this group could
not admit new members because the latter were not privy to their shared memories
and socially unconnected, having arrived from different previous places of residence.
Moreover, the older group was not willing to admit new members into the intimacy and
sense of belonging provided by its stock of memories, for this would have distorted
the familiar internal constitution of the established group. It is this spatially and
temporally determined divide which defines membership in what Elias and Scotson
call established and outsider groups (1965:xxxvi-xxxvii).
One might ask whether an outsider group is synonymous with a periphery or
peripheral group. The term outsider evokes a strict separation from the established
center, while a periphery is merely on the edge, outskirts or fringe of something
central (or, according to the Greek origins of the term, on the circumference or
periphreia). In social terms, however, a periphery is akin to the state of being an
outsider. For the study of Winston Parva shows that being either established or an
outsider is not merely a spatial distinction, but one determined by relations which
develop over timerelations which are determined by the flow of information
between individuals within groups and between the groups, where such a flow of
information fosters the accumulation of shared episodic memories, the elaboration of
semantic memories and the development of ritual memories. In Winston Parva, in the
absence of perceptible ethnic or religious differences or of differences determined by
gender, class, education or income, the center and the periphery therefore appear to
be distinguished exclusively, if not essentially, by the degree to which memories are
shared or not shared, and the will to maintain them within the group and distinguish
them from those of other groups.
Elias and Scotson do not write about memory, and their work predates recent
writing about memory by several decades. Yet their work about the established and
outsiders helps us to recognize the role of memory in the formation of social centers
and peripheries. By placing emphasis on habits of communication about common
pasts, which sustain common memories in combination with shared attachments
and dislikes, Elias and Scotson help us to (a) conceive of the role of memory in
the formation and maintenance of a social periphery as a temporal entity, whereby
information is exchanged among members of groups who talk over a period of time,
and whereby the longer they talk or gossip, the more fixed the memories become; (b)
define social (and, by deduction, political) legitimacy in relation to the length of time
over which information is exchanged via such media as gossiping within groups; and
(c) recognize the relativity of insideroutsider or centerperiphery relations, whereby
one groups center is anothers periphery (and vice versa), separated only by the
longevity of gossip among its members.
REFERENCE
Elias, Norbert, and Scotson, John L. (1965). The Established and the Outsiders: A
Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems. London: Frank Cass.
143
Memory construction on the European Unions

peripheries: East European and former Yugoslav
countries
LEA DAVID
The very formation of the European Union brought to the fore the concept of
a European periphery within the discourse of both EU elites and the academic
community. European peripheries are constructions of both real and symbolic power,
and they are evident in terms of core-periphery dependencies, changing cultural
mentalities, processes of othering and intra-regional animosity, all within a Union
ostensibly rooted in the principle of cooperation and solidarity. For the sake of joining
the EU club, East European countries in general, and the former Yugoslav countries
in particular, had to undergo a strict process of Europeanization, i.e., adoption of and
adjustment to EU norms and values.
As an essential part of the Europeanization process is adopting European norms
and values, one has to ask what those shared values, cultures and identities are that
represent the European heritage. The manifold forms of identification with Europe are
based on a European civilization characterized by structural and cultural pluralism
and related external and internal boundary constructions, as well as long-term
legacies and short-term memories. The idea of Europe, historically and sociologically,
became a political idea and mobilizing metaphor at the end of the twentieth century,
particularly in the wake of 1989. The collapse of the Communist regime changed
the boundaries: both the tangible and symbolic borders separating Eastern Europe
from Western Europe and the content of the value system with which the people had
identified. However, while old boundaries were being taken down, new ones emerged
or were strengthened. A stronger dividing line appeared from the East, separating
Eastern and Central Europe from the former Soviet republics. At a symbolic level,
old resentments were dug out, dormant historical enmities were reawakened and the
memories of Soviet domination and oppression were brought to the fore in public
debates (Sztompka, 2004).
Those imagined lines between East and West also had real consequences, as they
highlighted some unresolved disputes from the past between the Eastern and Central
European countries with both Russia and the European core. The gravity of the
unresolved historical accounts central to the present divisions of European identity
Memory construction on the European Unions peripheries
has been exposed through the ways in which official versions of the war and postwar
era have unraveled in the European core (Judt, 1992), especially since the enlargement
of the European Union in 2004. The breakdown of the Communist regimes and the
political and social transformations in Central and Eastern Europe have occurred in
the context not only of the reconstruction of national and European identities, but also
of the atrocious experiences of WWII; the betrayal of Yalta leading to the installation
of Communist regimes under the umbrella of the Soviet Union; and the hardened
forms of ethnic nationalism to which the Communist regimes adjusted in various
forms of national Communism (Spohn, 2005).
Nevertheless, the realities of war and postwar in Eastern Europe have generally
been concealed in the Western publics consciousness and have been marginalized
rather than institutionalized. Once again, it is the power relation of the structures and
the hierarchies of otherness that clearly dictate supremacies of memory contents
and are yet another symptom of the European feudal framework and neocolonial
policies (Horvat and tiks, 2012). All post-Communist countries, whether already
accepted or still waiting to become European member countries, had to face ignorance
and non-recognition, with their historical memories largely ignored.
While this is certainly true for post-Stalinist countries, in post-Yugoslav countries
the Communist past was overshadowed by the violent wars of the 1990s. The
unwillingness and/or inability to discuss the nature of these wars was largely enabled
by the Europeanization process and the imposed power relations. Thus, instead
of dealing with roles and responsibilities across ethnic lines, all post-Yugoslav
governments are engaged in reframing and obfuscating the contested elements of
their national past. The attempts to position themselves toward Europe/ the West are
common to all post-conflict former Yugoslav countries. The common denominator
among former Yugoslav countries, as Barth (1969) noted in his groundbreaking book,
Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, is that of the definition of borders in opposition to the
others. Thus, Horvat and tiks (2012) argue that the very concept of transition as
an ideological construct of domination, based on the narrative of integration of the
former Socialist Europe into the Western core, actually hides the monumental power
imbalance whereby this region is being converted into a dependent semi-periphery
area. Additionally, the adjunct concepts of weak state or failed state paper over
the fact that these are not anomalies of the transition, but actually circumstances
which force nation-states to create mechanisms to help them juggle and overcome
tensions between often contradictory external and internal demands.
But how do these real and symbolic powers ascribed to the northwestern European
pole affect the process of memory construction in post-Communist, post-war and
post-Yugoslav Serbia? Who generates the meanings of the past and who determines
how to frame the contents of the past in the existing power relation structures? In other
145
Lea David
words, how does the process of Europeanization, by dictating power relations, shape
the construction of collective memory?
The process of collective memory construction in the former Yugoslav countries
cannot be understood only within the context of Europeanization and processes
such as consolidation of human rights discourse (Levy and Sznaider, 2006) and the
cosmopolitization of collective memory (Levy and Sznaider, 2010), nor can they
be explained solely through the given national contexts. It is the nature of their
contested past, together with existing power relationships between local, national
and transnational memory entrepreneurs, that eventually determine which concrete
memories are transformed into abstract memory and which memories stay attached
to ethnically bound frameworks. All post-Yugoslav governments have also had to
filter and decontextualize certain adverse memory contents to better their chances
of being accepted into the European Union. These dual negotiations over visions
of the past, between the state and civil society, on the one hand, and between the
state and the international community, on the other hand, generate the process of
collective memory construction in all post-conflict Yugoslav spaces (David, 2014).
Unfortunately, the outcome is that, at the top-down level, ethnic nationalism is being
reinforced and strengthened rather than dissolved by the Europeanization process,
while at the bottom-up level, a multitude of contradictory and competing narratives
are created, which are preserved and held waiting in the sidelines for the apposite
social setting to arrive in order to burst out.
REFERENCES
Barth, Fredrik. (1969). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of
Cultural Difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
David, Lea. (2014). Mediating international and domestic demands: Mnemonic battles
surrounding the monument to the fallen of the wars of the 1990s in Belgrade.
Nationalities Papers 42,4:655673.
socialism, the European Union, and a New Left in the Balkans. Monthly Review:
An Independent Socialist Magazine 63,10. http://monthlyreview.org/ 2012/03/01/
welcome-to-the-desert-of-transition/.
Judt, Tony. (1992). The past is another country: Myth and memory in postwar Europe.
Daedalus 121,4:83118.
146
Memory construction on the European Unions peripheries
Levy, Daniel, and Sznaider, Natan. (2006). Sovereignty transformed: A sociology of

human rights. British Journal of Sociology 57,4:657676.
. (2010). Human Rights and Memory. University Park, PA: Penn State University
Press.
Spohn, Willfried. (2005). National identities and collective memory in an enlarged
Europe. In K. Eder and W. Spohn (eds.), Collective Memory and European Identity
(pp. 114). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Sztompka, Piotr. (2004).The trauma of social change: A case of postcommunist societies.
In J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds.), Cultural
Trauma and Collective Identity (pp. 155195). Berkeley: University of California
Press.
147
Rethinking memory and periphery in the age of

Anthropocene
EWA DOMANSKA
One of the most important changes in avant-garde humanities and social sciences has
been brought on by the impact of what is called a geological turn and discussions
on the Anthropocene (the label of a proposed new geological era of the Earths history
dominated by the human), as well as a neurobiological turn. The change of scale
caused by these turns is particularly important for rethinking our understanding of
memory and the spatial metaphor of centerperiphery. For Anthropocene humanities,
the notion of the globe is too restricted and the concept of human time too short to
answer questions of what is life or what is human/humanity, or to permit an adequate
discussion of the problems of climate change, extinction of species and environmental
degradation. Thus, we hear about planetary perspective (and comparative
interplanetary studies) and a geological time scale, on the one hand, and about the
molecular level (for example, The Human Microbiome Project) and a short life span
of cells, on the other. The distinction between Terrans (Earth-born beings, only some
of whom are humans) and Humans (carbon-based lifeforms belonging to the human
race) is introduced into scientific discourse. These changes herald a paradigm shift
and a growing interest in nonanthropocentric and postgeocentric approaches to the
humanities and social sciences. How might they influence our discussions of memory
and conceptions of centers and peripheries?
First of all, our understanding of the notion of periphery is changing. For Anthropocene
humanities, the planet Earth (and the entire solar system) might be understood as a
cosmic periphery, or some distant planets might be understood as galactic peripheries
from the perspective of Earth (if one still wants to sustain a geocentric position). In
such a view, the human race might become peripheral as a species and reduced to
the status of one of the representatives of carbon-based forms of life (consider in this
context Primo Levis remarks on carbon presented in his Periodic Table). However, in
the Anthropocene, humans have become the main geological force causing changes
on Earth and as such maintaining a central position.
A geological perspective promotes a focus on stratigraphy. Such thinking is
relevant to interpretations of the material vitality of the earth, necrogeography and
the morphology of, for example, the Nazi death camps. Thus, we might consider the
Rethinking memory and periphery in the age of Anthropocene
camps as kinds of anthropogenic landscapes and study decomposition of remains

as processes of organic revitalization (death camps as the habitat of new life), as
presented, for example, in the video shot at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp by the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka entitled Bambi-Winterreise.
With the changes of perspective indicated above, the notion of memory and its
relation to human heritage can be seen in a different light. A distinctively human
memory might be discussed versus animal memories; genetic memory and microbial
memory might also serve as subjects of discussion. The problem of a politics of
memory might be complemented by such subjects as topographies of memory,
multispecies memory and the metabolics of memory.
149
Notes from the periphery of globalizing memory:

The Jewish exile in Shanghai
ZHUANG WEI and ASTRID ERLL
When studying the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case of memory in the global
age (Levy and Sznaider, 2006), China and Shanghai appear at first glance as
rather peripheral sites. The Jewish exile in Shanghai is not part of the core canon
of events and places commonly connected with the Holocaust; it does not belong to
the geography of Holocaust memory, with its central sites in Europe and (as far as
exile is concerned) in America. But while Shanghai may be located at the margins of
Holocaust remembrance today, it was once vital as literally the port of last resort,
where well into the 1940s access without visa was possible, and where therefore
almost 20,000 Jews could be saved from persecution in Nazi Europe.
China has remembered and reappropriated this part of its Jewish history only
recently. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum opened in 2007 on the site of the
former Ohel Moshe Synagogue in the Hongkou district. It highlights the peaceful
coexistence of Chinese and Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s, thus reaching out
in its memory politics and transcultural rhetoric toward the Western world.
However, one institution, event or medium alone does not make a (however
peripheral or central) memory site. In fact, the emergence of a site of memory depends
on complex processes of mediation, remediation and the circulation of representations
in the social arena (Erll and Rigney, 2009). It is the relative density of such sociomedial networks that makes a site of memory central or peripheral. And it seems
that the Jewish exile in Shanghai is currently on the move toward a more central
position in the landscape of globalizing Holocaust remembrance.
Over the past two decades, medial representations of the Shanghai exile have
become more numerous, more transcultural in both their form and content, and more
transnational in their production and reception. But they also have their (medial)
history: already in the 1930s and 1940s, a rich corpus of the typical eyewitness
media emerged from the mixed community in Shanghai: family letters, diaries,
theater plays, newspapers, poems and testimonies. After World War II, more and
more (auto-)biographies and historiographies written in Europe, Israel and the US
appeared on the scene. From the 1990s onwards, a much broader range of media
dealing with the Jewish exile in Shanghai emerged, including novels, comic books,
Notes from the periphery of globalizing memory
movies and documentaries, and originating now also from places as diverse as China,
Japan, Australia and Germany. These new media of Shanghai memories tend to
draw on and refashion former representations, thus creating networks of mediated
memory across time and space. Their popular forms attract public attention; and
their translatability makes it possible for them to circulate across national and
linguistic borders.
We are thinking here about documentary films such as The Port of Last Resort
(1998) and Shanghai Ghetto (2002), Austrian-American and Israeli-American
co-productions respectively, which not only draw on eyewitness memories, but
also extensively remediate historical footage (thus examples of transnational and
transmedial memory work in film). We are thinking about novels such as A Jewish
Piano (2009; orig.
, 2007) by Chinese-Canadian writer Bei La, which
revolves around a love story between a male Polish-Jewish pianist in exile and a
female Chinese Communist. The novel remembers Shanghais transcultural past
as well as its anti-Japanese struggle. A bestseller in China, it also received great
attention at the Frankfurt book fair in 2009 (thus an example of the translation of
transcultural memory). And we are referring to memoirs such as Sugihara Yukikos
Visas for Life (the Japanese original of 1990 was translated into English in 1995),
which casts the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Sugihara Chiune, as an Asian Schindler,
and which was made into a Japanese movie in 1992, then followed by several
American documentary films and more biographies and autobiographies (thus an
example of the generativity of certain memory media).
All of these media products received various awards, are studied and taught
in academia and are discussed in social networks; politicians and other memory
agents refer to them. As different as they may be in their individual approaches to
the past, they are all part of the increasingly transnational socio-medial networks
that constitute the Jewish exile in Shanghai as a site of memory, which is currently
leaving its peripheral position and gaining visibility in the discrepant landscape of
globalizing memory.
REFERENCES
Erll, Astrid, and Rigney, Ann (eds.). (2009). Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of
Cultural Memory. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Levy, Daniel, and Sznaider, Natan. (2006). The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
151

HENRY GREENSPAN
Simply by inviting someone to speak as a Holocaust survivor foregrounds the

Holocaust as cause and much of the rest they may have to retell as some version of
effect. Such attributions of causality may or may not be true. What is beyond dispute
is that attributions in any life are complex, that survivors themselves wonder about
them all the time, and that their answers change over sustained conversation. What
was peripheral in memory may become central. When one pursues multiple interviews
with the same survivors, which has been my own approach for nearly forty years, that
happens all the time.1
For example, Victor, a survivor of Treblinka, initially explained two critical choices
of hispursuing factory work and marrying a non-Jewish woman after the war
as direct results of the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that was its foundation.
Regarding the former, he reflected:
I wasnt in business. I went to work in a factory. Do you know for what reason?
Because I was sick and tired of Polish people saying that Jews are always in
business. The Jews are always in business. This pierce my heart. I was one
Jew in a factory of a thousand people.
While it evokes more evident conflict, his marrying a non-Jewish womangoing
out of the line, as he called itwas similarly explained:
At that time, there was the feeling to get away from all this that happened. And, in
the future, to keep it away from those who come after me. Because there was the
feeling that no one can stop another wave of that.
History can repeat itself. I dont want that my children should suffer the way I
did. I dont want to have on my conscience that I lead them to another Holocaust.
Victor has specific memories of some who did curse their ancestry in the midst of the
destruction. They are part of what inform these reflections.
It came as a surprise, then, that several months into our conversations Victor offered
additional, and quite different, explanations for his choices. Regarding factory work,
it emerged that this was what Victor wanted to do, and his choosing it over business
was not reducible to Polish anti-Semitism. Indeed, many years before the war, Victors
preference for factory work had been a source of conflict with his father, who was
himself a successful businessman:
My father didnt want me to work in a factory. He wanted me to be a businessman.

To do the same thing he does.
HG: He said thats what he wanted?
Yeah. He criticized me. He criticized me. That nobody in the family should work
in a factory. And I work in a factory. I liked work in the factory. I liked it. My
father didnt like it. But I did like it.
Thus, a fully normal father-son conflict emerged, and a choice not attributed here to
hatred or the Holocaust.
While Victors readiness to marry a Catholic woman may well have been conditioned
by the destruction, there were also far more affirmative reasons why he married the
particular woman he did. Choosing for love and against business were, in fact, related,
as he explained regarding his briefly working in the jewelry business with a surviving
brother when he first came to the US in 1950:
I started with my brother in the business. But then I went back to Italy after three
months because I left my heart over there.
HG: You left your heart?
I fall in love in Rome. So I make three trips there and back. I was already here
three months, and I go back to Italy. Where I stayed six months with my wife.
I even read, every month there is a Jewish newspaper. And in it they write about
some woman, her husband die, and they are looking for someone to marry her and
take him into the business. This was Jewish people. I read it. I paid no attention. I
was in love with her. You understand?
The word love was startling in our conversations because of its complete absence to
that point. As Victor surrendered to the thrall of these memories, his description of his
relationship with his sonembattled because of his sons own romantic relationship
(because of conflicts concerning the cost of phone calls, not faith)took on an
entirely different tone:
I was the same. When I was in love, I was the same. Ardent. An ardent lover. I see
me in him. I see, when I look back, I see where I was. Three times, three times I
went back over to Italy!...I was also in love. I was also crazy.
What began as an interview with a Holocaust survivor became a kind of guy talk
much of which I cannot repeat here, both out of respect for Victors privacy and that
of all ardent lovers.
There are no memories of Sarah without memories of Hagar, but one set of memories
may certainly eclipse the other. Changes in the way one remembers and explains ones
life coincide with changes in the way one experiences it, and not only for the one
whose life it is. We, as observers, are not accustomed to engaging a Treblinka survivor
153
Henry Greenspan
and a crazy, ardent lover as the same person. But we will have to learn to do so if we
are to take lives seriously, and know that the peripheral often actually isnt.
NOTE
1
I discuss this multiple interview method and its yield in the second edition of On
Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony (2010, St. Paul: Paragon
House). Victors retelling is also discussed in detail in On Listening.
154
Memory, periphery, center: The Nakba as a

case in point
SHMULIK LEDERMAN
The debate about the Nakba, both in Israel and internationally, illustrates how
memory is shaped in a complex relationship between center and periphery. Take, for
example, the fact that the works of the Israeli historian Benny Morris have become
the authoritative ones in every discussion about the Nakba. Does this only have to
do with the fact that his work relies on meticulous research in the Israeli archives
that were opened to scholars in the 1980s? Or is it also because of the relations of
power between Israel and the Palestinians? And is it only a coincidence that Morris
works, despite being ground-breaking with regard to Israels responsibility for the
Nakba, ultimately legitimate the basic Jewish-Israeli narrative according to which,
even if there were many expulsions of Palestinians during 194748, there was
no central policy of expulsion? (In Morriss famous statement, The Palestinian
refugee problem was born by war, not by design, (1987:286)).
Here is, for instance, a paradigmatic expression of the way Morris conclusion
were easily digested by the Israeli mainstream, in jurist Ruth Gavisons words:
Despite the fierce dispute surrounding the claims of the new historians, the
picture remains reasonably clear: More than half a million Arabs left Israel
during the 1948 War of Independence and in the period immediately after.
There was no systematic policy of expelling or uprooting themin fact, in
some places the Arabs were specifically asked to remain, while in others they
left in response to their leaders calls. Many Arabs, however, indeed fled from
the threat of hostilities, and in certain instances were expelled (2006:32, n.15).
And earlier:
There is no doubt that the consequences of the war were difficult and tragic
for the local Arab population. However, one cannot conclude from that that
the sole or primary responsibility for the tragedy rests on Israels shoulders.
The Arabs cannot hold the rope from both sides: justify the rejection of the
international resolution on the partition plan, and [at the same time] complain
that during the war the Arab population suffered a similar fate to the one it
sought to inflict on the Jewish population (Gavison, 2006:16).1
Shmulik Lederman
However, as some scholars suggest (Ben Ami, 2006:43; Finkelstein, 2001), this
is not the only way to interpret the evidence Morris himself presents. Space here
does not allow a serious discussion of this issue, so only in way of illustration,
here is an important paragraph from Morris The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem:
Ben Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish
State. He hoped to see them flee. He said as much to his colleagues and aides
in meetings in August, September and October. But no expulsion policy
was ever enunciated and Ben Gurion always refrained from issuing clear
or written expulsion orders; he preferred his generals understand what
he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the great
expeller and he did not want the Israeli government to be implicated in
a morally questionable policy. And he sought to preserve national unity in
wartime (1987:292293).
Consider this observation in light of the way, for example, the Galilee Arabs
were expelled:
Without doubt, many officers, perhaps including Carmel, had wanted the
Galilee pocket depopulated; certainly this was the defense ministers
wish. (After all, Ben-Gurion had told one interlocutor only days before
the offensive: The Arabs of Palestine have only one function leftto
run away.) But this had never been translated into policy or operational
instructions.
But on the morning of 31 October, rising early, Ben-Gurion drove up to
Safad, Northern Front HQ, where he met Carmel. What exactly was said
is unknown, but Ben-Gurion jotted down in his diary that he (or Carmel)
expected additional Arabs to flee the areaand Carmel promptly
while Ben-Gurion was still with him or hard on the heels of the Old Mans
departureinstructed all units: Do all in your power for a quick and
immediate cleansing of the conquered areas of all the hostile elements in
line with the orders that have been issued (Morris, 2008:346).
To my mind, it is hard to understand these descriptions other than as an unofficial,
unwritten, but certainly a central and quite systematic policy of expulsion,
designed by Ben Gurion and implemented through his senior army officers, in
particular Yigal Alon in the south and Moshe Carmel in the north.
Gavisons words are paradigmatic also in the sense that, in the discussion about
the Nakba, only rarely is it pointed outand, more importantly, its meaning
156
Memory, periphery, center
understoodthat, despite some of their leaders calls, most Palestinians did

not actively resist the partition plan, and many of them were probably willing
to accept it, if only for their inability to prevent it. Avraham Sela, for example,
observes that the picture that emerged in the first months was of a very low level
of mobilization of the Palestinians for the fighting effort (1996:164). Similarly,
Yoram Nimrod writes that even during the Arab success (April 1948), most
of the Arab public did not join the war, perhaps since it did not and could not
stand against the Jews (2000:126). Yosef Nevo estimates that the Palestinian
leadership succeeded in recruiting about 4,000 Palestinian fighters (1985:315).
If this estimation is accurate, it is a tiny minority of the Palestinian population.
There has been, in fact, a paradoxical convergence of the mainstream Jewish
narrative with the mainstream Palestinian narrative: As Nur Masalha (2012)
points out, up until the 1970s the Palestinian discourse about the Nakba
was dominated by the PLO, which emphasized the heroic resistance of the
Palestinians. Only since the early 1970s have personal stories of ordinary
refugees, which oftentimes are much less heroic (militarily speaking), come to
have a place in this discourse (Masalha, 2012:215). Salim Tamari puts it this
way: In fact, the vast majority of the Palestinians did not fight. They simply
fled, for a number of reasonsthey were ashamed, and for this reason did not
talk about it (2004:1415). Omar Al-Qattan adds to this another, gender-laden
aspect:
[T]he literature about 1948 and pre-1948 was for a very long time rhetorical,
politicalone could perhaps call it a highly masculine response to
catastrophe. Much later, particularly after the 1967 War more personal,
detailed accounts began to emerge, more feminine recollections if you
wish, though they were by no means confined to women writers (2007:199).
Or, as Isabelle Humphries and Laleh Khalili put it: While Palestinian memory
as a whole has been pushed to the backstage by the Zionist narrative, Palestinian
womens voices have been doubly marginalized (2007:209).
Here, then, are complicated relationships between memory, center and
periphery. The collective memory of the Israeli mainstream historiography
was partially propped up by the collective memory of the mainstream within
the Palestinian periphery. Both converged to shape a unified image of the
Palestinians, as if they were a monolithic mass who acted out of a single will
and a single understanding and reaction to the partition plan in Palestine. Both
have helped to obscure what happened in 194748 and by that obstruct an honest
discussion about Israels responsibility for the Nakba.
157
Shmulik Lederman
REFERENCES
Al-Qattan, Omar. (2007). The secret visitations of memory. In Ahmad H. Sadi and
Lila Abu-Lughod (eds.), Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (pp.
191206). New York: Columbia University Press.
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. (2006). Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Finkelstein, Norman G. (2001). Image and Reality of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict. New
York/London: Verso.
Gavison, Ruth. (2006). The Jewish state: A justification. In David Hazony, Yoram
Hazony and Michael Oren (eds.), New Essays on Zionism (pp. 336). Jerusalem/
New York: Shalem Press.
Humphries, Isabelle, and Khalili, Laleh. (2007). Gender of Nakba memory. In Ahmad
H. Sadi and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds.), Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of
Memory (pp. 207228). New York: Columbia University Press.
Masalha, Nur. (2012). The Palestine Nakba: Decolonizing History, Narrating the
Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. London/New York: Zed Books.
Morris, Benny. (1987). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 19471949.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
. (2008). 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven/London: Yale
University Press.
Nevo, Yosef. (1985). The Palestinians and the Jewish state in the years 19471948. In
Yehuda Wallach (ed.), We Were as Dreamers: A Collection of Essays on the War of
Independence (pp. 295334). Tel Aviv: Masada (Hebrew).
Nimrod, Yoram. (2000). The Option of Peace and the Way of War: The Formation of
Israel-Arab Relations Patterns, 1947-1950. Givat Khaviva: Institute of Peace
Research (Hebrew).
Sela, Avraham. (1996). The Palestinians in the 1948 war. In Moshe Maoz and B. Z. Keidar
(eds.), The Palestinian National Movement: From Confrontation to Reconciliation?
(pp. 115203). Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense (Hebrew).
Tamari, Salim. (2004). The creation of the refugees problem: Historical background. In
Rafi Netz (ed.), The Problem of the Palestinian Refugees and the Right of Return
(pp. 1317). Tel Aviv: The Steinmetz Center for Peace Studies (Hebrew).
158
Centering mnemonic peripheries: From heroic

victors to deserving victims
DANIEL LEVY
In this short meditation on the state of memory studies, I would like to challenge the
central presupposition informing this volume. Namely that much of the research
in the field of memory studies still focuses on the alleged center of society and
on collective, cultural or social memory as representing the elusive notion of a
majority. In this view, peripheral perspectives supposedly remain confined to the
margins. I suggest an alternative reading of the recent genealogy of memory studies:
one in which the marginal has moved center stage.
The field is replete with a copious number of case studies recounting the by now widely
known trajectories of the politics of memory. However, what is striking about most
of these studies is the diminishing command the nation-state has over the production
of shared memory cultures. Aside from the high degree of reflexivity characterizing
contemporary memory politics, they reveal challenges and contestations from the
periphery. This schematic overview has to suffice here (for a more comprehensive
genealogy of the field, see Olick, Vinitsky-Seroussi and Levy, 2011).
Nora (2002), not exactly a friend of extra-national memory movements, provides a
succinct analysis of the rise of peripheral voices and situates their origins in the context
of emerging identity politics since the 1970s. This trajectory is manifested, among
other things, in the popularity of Foucaults (1975) notion of counter-memory. With
the emergence of the Human Rights Regime during the 1990s, these developments
privileging the voices of the victimsculminate in what Olick (2007) has aptly
coined a politics of regret. That is, not only do we witness the proliferation of socalled counter-memories, but they are also frequently inscribed into official memory
politics. Elsewhere, Levy and Sznaider (2010) have addressed these developments as
the cosmopolitanization of memory cultures. One measure assessing the salience of
this transformation of memory practices is evidenced in the widespread critique of
states refusing to engage with the requisite recognition of the other and the persistent
(or even heightened) cultivation of nation-centric memories.
To be sure, states continuously attempt to dominate images and discourses of the
past, but they now do so on a contested terrain, propelled by the legitimate quest of
recognition by the other. If history was once written by the victors, the mnemo-
Daniel Levy
historical turn described here gives political (and analytic) priority to discourses of
victimhood. If history (and historiography) once were the handmaidens of nationstate formation, memory has since assumed the role of public defendant.
REFERENCES
Foucault, Michel. (1975). Film and popular memory: An interview with Michel Foucault.
Radical Philosophy 11:2429.
Levy, Daniel, and Sznaider, Natan. (2010). Human Rights and Memory. University Park:
Penn State University Press.
Nora, Pierre. (2002). The reasons for the current upsurge in memory. Transit 22:16.
Olick, Jeffrey K. (2007). The Politics of Regret. On Collective Memory and Historical
Responsibility. London: Routledge.
Olick, Jeffrey K., Vinitsky-Seroussi, Vered, and Levy, Daniel. (2010). The Collective
Memory Reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
160
Spatializing memory
GERD SEBALD
At first glance, it seems to be not so easy to combine the temporal term memory
with the spatial term periphery in a logical way. Its hard to think of fringes or
margins in the temporal dimension, on the one hand, and think of a (not metaphorical)
spatial form of recurrence to the past, on the other. But this spatialization of memory
offers interesting new perspectives on our relationship to the past. I want to discuss
five of them.
(1) The opposite of periphery is the center or the core. So asking for the periphery
of one single memory means also to ask for the core of that memory. That could
be answered with the most relevant contents, the core contents, those which are
most important for the functioning of that unit of memory. If the core function is the
stabilizing of identity, the heart of memory is the image of ones self, both the own
one and that produced by others. The periphery could then be designated to the least
relevant elements for the core of that function. The difference between center and
periphery is then constituted by the difference in the criteria of selection.
(2) Asking for the periphery means also asking for the borders, the fringes, the
margins of a given memory. That means also to ask for the unit of memory itself. It
seems to be easy in the case of an individual memory. But even an individual memory
contains a lot of social matters and, as Halbwachs (1992) has shown, a lot of social
frames. It uses a multiplicity of media technologies in order to reconstruct past events.
Is the diary, the blog, the social media account part of the individual memory or not?
Is the past stored in the body (Connerton, 1989) part of that unit, when most of it is
not accessible by explicit reflection? And what is the unit of a social memory, say of
a group or an organization? In my view, there are a lot of connections, overlappings,
translations, associations, interferences, interpenetrations between memories. So
James (1890) metaphor of the fringes seems to be a good way of describing those
transitions and intersections between different memories. There are no clear-cut
boundaries between memories. Even the periphery is some way or another connected
to the core, maybe to more than one core.
(3) Reintroducing the temporal dimension in the spatially metaphorized memory
opens up the way for a dynamic conception of periphery. Peripheriality is not a status
given forever, only for a present state of affairs. It is subject to change in every new
situation, when relevances shift, when other things become important and move
Gerd Sebald
toward the center. In the course of a crisis the peripheral could even become the new
center. So the seemingly high stability that space and its metaphorizations offer is only
temporary.
(4) Describing memory in spatial terms suggests also the analogy of a storage room
or repository, where the contents are deposited and retrieved. But it is important to
stress two points here: Firstly, memory is an operation, one that always works in the
present. It is a way of processing information and providing the results for present
operations. The past is never just retrieved as is; it is processed in recollection. So
presented past is selected, formed and constructed on the conditions of a present
context and actual anticipations of the future. Secondly, we do not have access to past
events, only remnants, processed data are memorized.
(5) Every form of communication seems to be an externalization into a spatial
form. The sound waves move away from the speaker; writing is the arrangement of
a sequence of signs in a normally two-dimensional space; painting uses lines and
colors on a canvas; and so on. These externalizations could become the base for social
memories, depending on the duration of the materiality of the medium. Sociality
of memories depends largely on media spaces and media temporality in terms of
duration and use. Then, the spatial order of social memories, both inside and outside,
is triggered by media.
Spatializing memories as periphery (and core) gives rise to a bunch of questions
that lead right to the center of theories of memory. As we still have no comprehensive
theory of (social) memories, maybe those questions help to pave the way toward such
a theory.
REFERENCES
Connerton, Paul. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Halbwachs, Maurice. (1992). On Collective Memory. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
James, William. (1890). The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. New York: Holt.
162
Central and peripheral perspectives in

autobiographical memory
JOHN SUTTON
In some memories, I now see myself in the past scene, with the events playing out as
from an observers perspective. In other cases, I remember the episode as from my
original perspective, now inhabiting the same perspective as I did then. Many people
can switch or flip between these two ways of remembering the same past experiences,
or perhaps even somehow blend or fuse these external and internal perspectives
simultaneously. As I recall one particular incident in the school playground, I look up
at the high walls and around at the confused crowd of kids as if from my six-year-old
vantage point: then, suddenly, I seem to be occupying another perspective, high and
to the side of the whole scene, looking down on myself among the noisy milling crew.
Since Freud, these dual or rather multiple points of view in autobiographical memory
have served to underline what are now familiar messages about the constructive
nature of recall: remembering is often a furiously active process, evading control,
rather than the deliberate retrieval of some static item that was waiting there all along.
Thus arise the personal and political challenges of forging room for memories still
to make real claims on the past, to maintain what the philosopher Sue Campbell
(2014) called a fidelity to events we can now only piece together from present traces.
Yet the phenomena of perspective taking in memory raise more puzzles than either
psychologists or film theorists have acknowledged. How do the spatial aspects of
memory relate to its other modalities? How are distinctions between central and
peripheral features of past events constructed and contested?
Richard Wollheim (1984) uses the term centered event memory for cases in which
I adopt an own-eyes or field perspective on the experienced past. Wollheim was
well aware that memory is not exclusively a visual or visuo-spatial phenomenon,
that, as well as its other sensory dimensions, there are emotional, embodied or
kinesthetic perspectives. Yet, like many theorists across the disciplines, he still tended
to privilege such centered memory experiences as fundamental or somehow more
tightly tethered to reality, treating the adoption of external, peripheral or observer
perspectives as unstable or marginal phenomena.
The visuo-spatial aspects of memory experience are real, although operating very
differently across individuals, contexts and cultures. But, as Peter Goldie (2012) shows,
John Sutton
they need not coincide with memorys other modalities. My emotional identifications
with my past self, or my visceral sense of embodied engagement with that me-child
in the playground, can be intense even as my external visual perspective offers me
some distance, some possibility of abstraction or narrative. What might appear to be
peripheral modes of access to the past can also form rich and transformative parts
of memory experience if we acknowledge the internal complexity and multiplicity of
the first person.
The interiority or the warm antiquity of self with which autobiographical memory
is often associated thus appears as a context-sensitive and perhaps culturally fragile
achievement. It is built both on integrated sensory-affective-kinetic forms of access
to the past and on fluctuating perspectives on particular past experiences. Just as,
at a different scale, group memory encompasses conflict and heterogeneity among
internally diverse collectives, so the centered personal memories on which we
rightly rely are constructed or pulled together from complex interwoven multimodal
sources and fragments.
REFERENCES
Campbell, Sue. (2014). Our Faithfulness to the Past: The Ethics and Politics of Memory.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldie, Peter. (2012). The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion and the Mind. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Wollheim, Richard. (1984). The Thread of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press.
164
On the contributors
Safa Aburabia, PhD, is a historical anthropologist of culture, gender and space. Her
dissertation, Out of history: Hidden voices within gender spaces; Bedouin Arab
women tell the Nakba, documents the 1948 voices of Naqab (Negev) men and
women as to how their loss of land reshaped their identity from indignity and gender
perspectives. Her fields of research include feminist discourses in the Arab and Muslim
world, feminism and gender, identity of place, qualitative methodology, oral accounts
and silences in history. She is a faculty member of the Negev Mandel Center for
Leadership and a social activist. Recent publications include De-colonizing Bedouin
Arab discourse, in The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism: New Perspectives, edited
by M. Nasasra, S. Richter-Devroe, S. Abu-Rabia-Queder & R. Ratcliffe (Routledge,
2013); Memory, belonging and resistance: The struggle over place among the BedouinArabs of the Naqab/Negev, in Remembering, Forgetting and City Builders, edited by
T. Fenster & H. Yacobi (Ashgate, 2010); and Is slavery over? Black and white Arab
Bedouin women in the Naqab (Negev), in Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel,
edited by M. Levine & G. Shafir (University of California Press, 2009).
safa.ab@gmail.com
Guy Beiner is a senior lecturer of modern European history at the Department of
General History, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He has held several senior
research fellowships, most recently at the University of Oxford. Having previously
authored numerous publications on social memory in Ireland (and elsewhere), he is
currently completing a book on social forgetting in Ulster.
gbeiner@bgu.ac.il
Peter Carrier is a research fellow at the Georg Eckert Institute for International
Textbook Research in Braunschweig. He recently published the edited volume School
and Nation: Identity Politics and Educational Media in an Age of Diversity (Peter
Lang, 2013), as well as Holocaust memoriography and the impact of memory on the
historiography of the Holocaust, in Writing the History of Memory, edited by Bill
Niven and Stefan Berger (Bloomsbury, 2014); and (with Kobi Kabalek), Cultural
memory and transcultural memory: A conceptual analysis, in The Transcultural
Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders, edited by Lucy Bond and
Jessica Rapson (de Gruyter, 2014).
carrier@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Zuzanna Dziuban
Red Chidgey is a lecturer at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative

Industries, Kings College London. Her research examines the development
of community-based knowledge projects and the impact of digital culture on
sustaining social justice memories. She recently contributed articles on feminism,
cultural memory and grassroots media to the edited collections DIY Citizenship:
Critical Making and Social Media (MIT Press, 2014) and Powerful Times:
Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and
is currently working on a monograph examining the production and temporal
intensities of memory assemblages.
red.chidgey@kcl.ac.uk
Julia Creet, BA in history, University of Victoria; MA in history and philosophy
of education, University of Toronto; PhD in history of consciousness, UC Santa
Cruz. An associate professor of English at York University in Toronto, Julia
teaches memory studies and literary nonfiction. She is co-editor (with Andreas
Kitzmann) of Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory
Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and co-editor (with Sara Horowitz and
Amira Dan) of H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (Northwestern University
Press, Forthcoming). She is also the director and producer of MUM: A story of
silence (2008), a documentary about a survivor who tried to forget, and Need
to know: Ancestry and the industry of family (2015), a look at the industry
behind the innate need to know ones past.
creet@yorku.ca
http://yorku.academia.edu/JuliaCreet
Lea David recently completed her doctoral studies at the Department of Sociology
and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Her work examines
how the transition to democracy is changing the content of collective memory
in Serbia and producing new social categories. Her dissertation explores how a
contested past is managed through the clashes of local and global memory cultures.
She has also been lecturing on the conflict in the Former Yugoslav countries at
various Israeli universities and colleges. Her joint postdoctoral research at the
Anthropology Department and the Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Research at the
University of Haifa deals with memory politics in international relations. Recent
publications include Impression management of a contested past: Serbias newly
designed national calendar, Memory Studies (2014); Mediating international
and domestic demands: Mnemonic battles surrounding the monument to the
166
Memory as haunting
fallen of the wars of the 1990s in Belgrade, Nationalities Papers (2014); and
The Holocaust discourse as a acreen memory: The Serbian case in (Mis)Uses
of History: History as a Political Tool in the Western Balkans, edited by Srdjan
Jankovic and Veran Stancetic (Center for Good Governance Studies, 2013).
lead@post.bgu.ac.il
Ewa Domanska is associate professor of theory and history of historiography at
since 2002, visiting associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford
University. Her teaching and research interests include comparative theory of the
human and social sciences, history and theory of historiography, posthumanities
and ecological humanities. She is the author of four books, of which recent ones
include Existential History: A Critical Approach to Narrativism and Emancipatory
Humanities (Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, 2012, in Polish) and History and
the Contemporary Humanities (Nika Center, 2012, in Ukrainian). She is also editor
or co-editor of 14 books, including French Theory in Poland (with Miroslaw Loba;
Wydawnictwo Poznanskie, 2010, in Polish); Theory of Knowledge of the Past and the
Contemporary Humanities and Social Sciences (Wydawnictwo Poznanskie, 2010, in
Polish) and History Today (with Rafal Stobiecki and Tomasz Wislicz; Universitas,
2014, in Polish).
ewa.domanska@amu.edu.pl
Zuzanna Dziuban holds a PhD in cultural studies from the Adam Mickiewicz
and studied philosophy. She has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the University
of Konstanz (Geschichte & Gedchtnis research group), at the Humboldt University
of Berlin and at the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin. Her current research
interests focus on the relation between violence, memory and space; the Holocaust
and the post-war cultural politics of grief in Poland. She has published the monograph,
Foreignness, Homelessness, Loss: Dimensions of Atopia of the Contemporary
Cultural Experience
zuzanna.dziuban@vwi.ac.at
Astrid Erll is professor of Anglophone literatures and cultures at Goethe University
Frankfurt am Main. Her research interests include memory studies, transcultural
studies, narratology and media studies. She is general editor of the series Media
167
Zuzanna Dziuban
and Cultural Memory (de Gruyter, since 2004), has published books on memories
of the First World War (Gedchtnisromane; Wissenschaftlicher Trier, 2003) and
British colonialism in India (Prmediation, Remediation, Wissenschaftlicher
Trier, 2007), as well as an introduction to cultural memory studies (Memory in
Culture; Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and several edited volumes, such as Mediation,
Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (with Ann Rigney; de Gruyter,
2009), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (with Ansgar Nnning; de
Gruyter, 2010) and Film und kulturelle Erinnerung (with Stephanie Wodianka;
de Gruyter, 2008). She is founder of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform:
www.memorystudies-frankfurt.com.
erll@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Amy Garey is a doctoral student at the Department of Anthropology, University

of CaliforniaLos Angeles, and serves in the US Navy. Her current research
examines moral discourses in post-Soviet sketch comedy. Recent publications
include How it was: Semiotic approaches to Soviet references, Laboratorium,
(2012) and Aleksandr Galich: Performance and the politics of the everyday,
Limina (2011).
amgarey@ucla.edu
Henry (Hank) Greenspan is a psychologist and playwright at the University

of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who has been interviewing, teaching and writing about
Holocaust survivors for forty years. He is the author of On Listening to Holocaust
Survivors: Beyond Testimony, now in its second and expanded edition (Paragon
House, 2010); and, with Agi Rubin, Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory and a Life
Recreated (Paragon House, 2006). Recent publications include The unsaid, the
incommunicable, the unbearable and the irretrievable, Oral History Review
(2014) and guest editing a Scholars Forum for Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust,
Engaging survivors: Assessing testimony and trauma as foundational concepts
(2014). Rather than interviewing survivors in single testimonies, Greenspans
work has involved meeting with the same survivors over months, years and, with
some people, even decades. In 2012, he was the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair
at the Centre for Oral History at Concordia University in Montreal. His play,
Remnants, was first produced for National Public Radio in the United States and
has been staged at more than 300 venues worldwide.
hgreensp@umich.edu
168
Memory as haunting
Kobi Kabalek holds a PhD in history from the University of Virginia and is currently
a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His research explores
questions of experience, memory, cultural history and moral sentiments in Germany
and Israel. Recent publications include What is the context of memory?, in Theorizing
Social Memories: Concepts and Contexts, edited by Gerd Sebald and Jatin Wagle
(Routledge, 2015); Erinnern durch Scheitern: Erfolglose Rettungsversuche von
Juden in deutschen Nachkriegsfilmen und -literatur, 1945-1960, WerkstattGeschichte
(Forthcoming); and (with Peter Carrier) Cultural memory and transcultural memory:
A conceptual analysis, in The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between
and Beyond Borders, edited by Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson (de Gruyter, 2014).
kobikabalek@yahoo.com
Shmulik Lederman holds a PhD in political science from the University of
Haifa, and currently teaches at the Department of Sociology, Political Science
and Communication, The Open University of Israel; and at the International MA
Holocaust Studies Program, University of Haifa. His main research interests are
Hannah Arendts political thought; democratic theory; genocide; and the Jewish-Arab
conflict. Recently published articles include Agonism and deliberation in Arendt,
Constellations (2014); History of a misunderstanding: The banality of evil and
Holocaust historiography, Yad Vashem Studies (2013); Councils and revolution:
Participatory democracy in anarchist thought and the new social movements, Science
and Society (Forthcoming); and Hannah Arendts moral failure, Iyunim Bitkumat
Israel (Forthcoming).
shmulikled@gmail.com
Daniel Levy is professor at the Department of Sociology, State University of New
YorkStony Brook. He is interested in global studies and the cosmopolitan foundations
for a sociology of the 21st century. Among his books are The Holocaust and Memory
in the Global Age (Temple University Press, 2005) and Memory and Human Rights
(Penn State University Press, 2010), both co-authored with Natan Sznaider. Together
with Jeffrey Olick and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, he co-edited The Collective Memory
Reader (Oxford University Press, 2011).
daniel.levy@stonybrook.edu
Anke Pinkert is associate professor of German and of media and cinema studies at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Film and Memory in
169
Zuzanna Dziuban
East Germany (Indiana University Press, 2008) and has published widely on postwar
and post-Holocaust film, GDR literature and post-1989 culture.
pinkert@illinois.edu
Gerd Sebald teaches and does research at the Institute for Sociology of the FAU
Erlangen. His primary fields of interest are social memories, sociological theory,
sociology of knowledge and sociology of media and culture. He recently published
Generalisierung und Sinn. berlegungen zur Formierung von sozialen Gedchtnissen
und des Sozialen (UVK, 2014).
Gerd.Sebald@fau.de
John Sutton is professor of cognitive science at Macquarie University, Sydney, where
he was previously head of the Department of Philosophy. He is author of Philosophy
and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge University Press,
1998), and co-editor of Embodied Cognition in Shakespeares Theatre: The Early
Modern Body-Mind (Routledge, 2014). His research adopts interdisciplinary concepts
and methods to study autobiographical and social memory, skilled movement and
cognitive history. Journals in which his recent papers appear include Phenomenology
and the Cognitive Sciences, Memory Studies, Educational Philosophy and Theory,
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Journal of Mental Imagery, Textual Practice,
Early Modern Culture, Shakespeare Studies, Discourse Processes and Journal of
Consciousness Studies.
john.sutton@mq.edu.au
http://johnsutton.net/
Zhuang Wei has recently completed his PhD with a thesis on The Jewish exile in
Shanghai (1933-1950): Plurimedial and transcultural memory cultures at GoetheUniversity Frankfurt am Main. Zhuangs areas of scholarship include cultural memory
studies, Holocaust studies, critical discourse analysis and media studies. His articles
include Introduction to life writing of the Jewish exile in Shanghai, CLCWeb
(Forthcoming).
zhuangwei2006@gmail.com
http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/43130731/wei
http://www. memorystudies-frankfurt.com/people/zhuang-wei-2/
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HAGAR

Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities

Reut Reina Bendrihem

Memory and Periphery

HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities Vol.12 Winter 2014

Layout and cover design: Sara Levy, Beer-Sheva

Reut Reine Bendrihem, Kobi Kabalek and Mori Ram

Out of the air a voice without a face

Reut Reine Bendrihem, Kobi Kabalek and Mori Ram

interpretations, the texts gathered in this issue advance a view of memory

Memory and periphery: An introduction1

Although Katzman is a fictional character (a kind of Israeli Forrest Gump), The

Memory and periphery: An introduction

Center and periphery

Memories of the marginalized

Memory and periphery: An introduction

recollection, while talk can be used to enhance amnesia (Vinitzky-Seroussi and

Memory and periphery: An introduction

Pilgrimage to the past

Memory and periphery: An introduction

Memory at the margins

of relative or absolute invisibility is regularly raised in approaching questions of

Memory and periphery: An introduction

The question of whether to maintain a marginal position or to demand inclusion in

This is a reference to Chakrabarty (2000).

Memory and periphery: An introduction

Injustices. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ghosh-Schellhorn, Martina, and Alexander, Vera (eds.). (2006). Peripheral Centres,

Memory and periphery: An introduction

strange apotheosis of Rosa Parks. Social Psychology Quarterly 72,2:123142.

Re-viewing the margins: Peripheral memory and

Re-viewing the margins

space, reintroduces the possibility for spectatorial agency.2 As reviewers of Beyers

Symptoms of genuine comedy (Mrkische Volksstimme)

Re-viewing the margins

on the adventures of a modern Simplicissimus and his accidental encounters on the

Re-viewing the margins

reverberates in liminal cinematic spaces, more broadly conceived, including minor

Politics of lookingand looking again!

Re-viewing the margins

Re-viewing the margins

German war losses

mother holding a child that dominated the universalized pictorial representations of

Re-viewing the margins

Re-viewing the margins

Re-viewing the margins

Re-viewing the margins

capacity of cinema to mobilize the periphery as a site where spectatorial participation

I would like to thank Renate Gthe at the Pressedokumentations of the Hochschule

Im following Elsaessers and Wedels conception of films, presupposing a cinematic

James Chandler defines sympathy as a component which connects one sensorium

Re-viewing the margins

DDR. Kanonkmpfe und ihre Geschichte(n) [Literature Society GDR: Canon

Der Abend. (1978). Zwei Fsser-eine Frau. Nachkriegszeit im ironischen Spiegel:

Re-viewing the margins

Soviet reflections: Music, nostalgia and personhood

organizations, called KSP (Klub samodeiatelnoi pesni, or Club of Amateur Song),

Were all Russians here: Shifters and ethnic categories

Homo sovieticus: Person, time and chronotope

Russian radio, watched Russian satellite TV and frequented Russian restaurantsall

In spite my living in this country

Yeah and Bob Dylan you

Ognei tak mnogo zolotykh

several different symbolic universeseach itself a chronotopein order to