Memory & totalitarianism

198 Pages·2017·48.492 MB·English

by  Luisa Passerini

Memory
&
Totalitarianism
Memory and Narrative Series
Mary Chamberlain and Selma LeydesdorfJ, series editors
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(with Graham Dawson)
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editors
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and Sally Shuttleworth, editors
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The Uses of Narrative:
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Narrative and Genre: Contests and Types of Communication
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The Clash of Economic Cultures:
Japanese Bankers in the City of London
Junko Sakai
Narratives of Exile and Return
Mary Chamberlain
Memory
&
Totalitarianism
Edited by
Luisa Passerini
With a new introduction by
Richard Crownshaw and Selma Leydesdorff
Routledge
M
t
Taylor Group
LOt,mON AND YORK
First published in 1992 by Transaction Publishers by arrangement with
Oxford University Press
Published 2017 by Routledge
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New material this edition copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis. Copyright
© The Several Contributors, 1992.
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2005045705
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Memory and totalitarianism / Luisa Passerini, editor; with a new introduction
by Selma Leydesdorff and Richard Crownshaw.
p.cm—(Memory and narrative series)
Originally published: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1992.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-4128-0465-5 (alk. paper)
1.Oral history. 2. World politics—20th century. 3. Totalitarianism. I.
Passerini, Luisa. II. Memory and narrative.
D16.14.M46 2005
909.82—dc22 2005045705
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0465-3 (pbk)
Contents
Introduction to the Transaction Edition Vll
RICHARD CROWNSHAW AND SELMA LEYDESDORFF
List of Contributors xix
1. Introduction
LUISA PASSERINI
2. Antagonistic Memories: The Post-War Survival and
Alienation of] ews and Germans 21
FRANK STERN
3. Where Were You on 17 June? A Niche in Memory 45
LUTZ NIETHAMMER
4. A German Generation of Reconstruction: The Children
of the Weimar Republic in the GDR 71
DOROTHEE WIERLING
5. After Glasnost: Oral History in the Soviet Union 89
DARIA KHUBOVA, ANDREI IVANKIEV, and
TONIA SHAROVA
6. The Gulag in Memory 103
IRINA SHERBAKOVA
7. The Abduction of lmre Nagy and his Group: The
'Rashomon' Effect 117
ANDRAs KovAcs
8. Mujeres Libres: The Preservation of Memory under the
Politics of Repression in Spain 125
MARTHA ACKELSBERG
9. A Shattered Silence: The Life Stories of Survivors of
thejewish Proletariat of Amsterdam 145
SELMA LEYDESDORFF
10. Don't Forget: Fragments of a Negative Tradition 165
RENATE SIEBERT

Introduction to the Transaction Edition
On Silence and Revision: The Language
and Words of the Victims
RICHARD CROWNSHAW AND SELMA LEYDESDORFF
In Luisa Passerini's introduction to the original publication of this
volume (1992), she turned her attention to the theme of silence in
oral history and life stories. It is with this theme that we would like to
begin our introduction to the new edition of Memory and Totalitari
anism. As Passerini writes, the work of oral history has moved be
yond its earlier, na'ive assumptions that one of its tasks was to "simply
give voice to those who had been silenced by history .... Fighting si
lence is not enough; 'silence' is not even an appropriate term for the
task to come: what is to be fought is not only silence but distortions ....
Part of the memory that is emerging now, because it is no longer
impeded, is sometimes just as 'false' or 'wrong' as the one it op
poses" (16). Passerini was writing with particular reference to the
Holocaust. It is in the related areas of silence and revision that sig
nificant developments have taken place since this volume's first pub
lication, and in doing sq, we assume that these considerations will
also influence the study of other totalitarian regimes.
Trauma studies and Holocaust studies, which have informed each
other's development since their inception as academic, interdiscipli
nary fields of inquiry, have produced some progressive debates on
silence and revision, which might frame the consideration of oral
histories of totalitarianism. Critical and theoretical discourses sur
rounding Holocaust trauma and memory and its inscription in testi
mony, both written and oral, have to a certain extent valorized the
notion of silence. Such discourses trace (implicitly and explicitly) the
inception of the concept of silence back to survivor literature such as
Elie Wiesel's Night (1958). In the face of the inadequacies of Ian-
vii
VIII Introduction to the Transaction Edition
guage and the failure of reason or metaphysical beliefs to grasp such
an event, Night performs a paradox, the writing of silence. The con
cept of Night is, then, the void that surrounds and encroaches upon
language and meaning. Primo Levi's If This is a Man similarly ex
presses concern over the adequacy of language to translate the reality
of the camps (1947 Italian, 1959 English). For Levi it is not just a
case of the failure of language it is the failure of witness. The
"drowned," not the "saved," are the true witnesses: they who have
seen the absolute of the Holocaust and embody its impossible witness
("The Drowned and the Saved," 1986 Italian, 1988 English).
The theorization of Holocaust writing, to which the relatively new
discipline of Holocaust studies gave rise, has had to contend with the
silence, voids, and absence that paradoxically gave form to testimo
nial literature. These studies have found meaning in what cannot be
written, witnessed or remembered. From literary criticism to phi
losophy, Holocaust studies focused on what could not be said by and
of the Holocaust's victims, from George Steiner's Language and Si
lence (1967) to Jean Francois Lyotard's Differend: Phrases in Dis
pute (1983 French, 1988 English). The paradigm of the unspeakable,
then, has framed the analysis of the oral histories of the Holocaust
and has continued to do so.
Trauma studies have shown the way that silence is produced. For
Dori Laub, "[w ]hile historical evidence to the event which consti
tutes the trauma may be abundant and documents in vast supply," and
despite "the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its
occurrence, the trauma-as a known event and not simply as an over
whelming shock-has not been truly witnessed yet, has not been
taken cognizance of." It is only in the process of testimony that
the "event is given birth to" or known. Such cognizance is depen
dent upon those who listen, who witness the witness-who be
come the blank screen onto which the event is projected as if for
the first time (Laub 1992, 57; see also Rogers, Leydesdorff et al.
1999). Cathy Caruth similarly defines trauma as a crisis of wit
nessing (1996). For Caruth, Felman and Laub, this does not mean
that historicism is redundant but that it must be resituated as "no
longer straightforwardly referential. .. permitting history to arise where
immediate understanding may not" (Caruth 1996, 11). Emerging from
this understanding of traumatic experience is the idea that silence is
not a sign of the "elimination" of history but of its dislocation (Caruth
1996, 11).
Introduction to the Transaction Edition IX
What then of the agency of the witness in the face of trauma and
the process of testimony? Put another way, where lies the agency of
interpretation, with the witness or with the listener? In relation to
testimony, James Young argues that narratives of trauma witnesses
carry an ontological authenticity, but not necessarily a factual author
ity (1990, 22). A proximity to events, which allows eye-witnessing,
does not guarantee unmediated access to them. Not only does the
witness see through an already established cultural and ideological
lens, the narrative used to translate what has been witnessed cannot
"document anything beyond its own activity as construction" (1990,
22). In Young's reading of the rhetoric of testimony, what he terms
"literary historiography," agency lies in the witnesses' configuration
of the event-in what they can say (the interpretive achievement in
the face of trauma) rather than in what they cannot. As Wolf has
argued more recently, historicism lies between those who testify and
those who listen. For her, it is not the failures of witnesses' language
that shifts responsibility towards their listeners, but rather the respon
sibility of those who listen to understand the witnesses' interpretive
achievements (Wolf in Geldwert 2002, introduction).
LaCapra warns against the universalization of trauma and of the
danger of trauma informing a surrogate form of "deconstruction." In
other words, as a means of disrupting and eluding as well as showing
the rhetoric of the claims of history's master narratives, trauma might
become generalized. "Troping away from the specific," classifying
all modernity as traumatic, and over-extending the categories of sur
vivors and victims, the tendencies of some trauma studies overlook
the historical specificity of the traumatic event, the relation of survi
vor and or victim to that event and so the nature of traumatization
(LaCapra 1998, 23). Without this kind of historical specificity, the
political and ethical connotations of acts of remembrance and of iden
tities formed through those acts will be overlooked.
The predominance of the idea of a more general, widespread post
Holocaust silence-the idea of a twenty-year period of repression
supposedly experienced by the Holocaust's victims-has ignored the
proliferation of testimonies in the 1940s and 1950s. The problem is
one of translation and of the inability of societies to accommodate
such memories. Most of these testimonies were written in the lan
guages of Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, not to mention Rus
sian, which means that they have been outside the purview of Ameri
can Holocaust studies, in particular. However, the problem is older