New book on Trauma - Haunting Legacies

From: Columbia University Press

About the book:

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships.

Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's Still Alive and Marguerite Duras's La Douleur; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's W, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Philippe Grimbert's Secret; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Sabine Reichel's What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, and Ursula Duba's Tales from a Child of the Enemy. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Writing Against Memory and Forgetting

3. Haunting Legacies: Trauma in Children of Perpetrators

4. Identity Trouble: Guilt, Shame, and Idealization

5. Replacement Children: The Transgenerational Transmission of Traumatic Loss

6. Deadly Intimacy: The Politics and Psychic Life of Torture

Bibliography

About the author: Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her books in English include Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis; Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood; and The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language.

Conference: Forms and Functions of Social Memories

From UPENN CFP:

Call for Papers (see website here):

Forms and Functions of Social Memories -- Perspectives from Social and Cultural Sciences
The conference "Forms and Functions of Social Memories -- Perspectives from Social and Cultural Sciences" takes place at the Institute for Sociology of the University of Erlangen. It starts at December 10th and ends December 12th around noon. It is planned as a mixture between plenary and panel sessions.

Please send a 500 words proposal for a 30 min. paper by September 30th, 2010 to: info@soziale-erinnerung.de.

The conference aims at collecting and re-considering the manifold empirical research on social memories on behalf of their theoretical potential. It is an astonishing fact, that despite of a lot of research in social and cultural sciences on social memories there are rather few comprehensive theoretical considerations. Therefore, we want to set the focus on the integration of different theoretical approaches and empirical research.

In the self-definition of modernity multiple social memories take the place of the "Great Narrative" on different levels that don't have to be compatible. A theory of social memories faces the problem of integrating social dynamics, cultural pluralisation and processes of social differentiation without ignoring contexts of interactions like families or milieus. However, the circulating terms and definitions of forms of social memories should not just be placed side by side. Instead we want to focus, empirically and theoretically, on the processes of formation and constitution that underlie these conceptualizations to work out both lines of conflict and potentials of integration.

The conference would like to discuss theoretical concepts and empirical studies concerning social memories in an interdisciplinary framework. Based on these discussions we would like to ask for theoretical enhancements. From performative acts to narrative situations of interaction or discourse, constructions and representations of the past should be observed in conjunction with problems like oblivion, authenticity, factuality and validity or breaches in the transmission of the past. On the one hand the future directedness of social memories in form of again and again constituted horizons of expectations should be clarified. On the other hand it is deemed to analyse social memories in their function as mechanisms of "Transmission" regarding the specific selectivities that evolve at the intersections (of persons, groups, generations, discourses, etc.) and that constitute the specific relationship between remembrance and oblivion. According to this, the definition of the particular functionality of memories for the processes of social and individual formation of meaning is important, on both counts biographically and systemically.

Of equal importance is the reflection of institutionalised remembrance and of the own position of a speaker: Scientists are directly or indirectly involved in the practice of (institutionalised) remembrance and therefore are facing the challenge of concerning themselves with its contexts, conditions, (political) purpose and the implicit ideologies.

We have invited the following speakers: Paul Connerton (Oxford/UK), Elena Esposito (Modena/Reggio Emilia/ Italy), Mary Fulbrook (London/UK), Jeffrey K. Olick (Virginia/USA), Gabriele Rosenthal (Goettingen/Germany), Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (Warsaw/Poland), Christian Gudehus (Essen/Germany)

Topics include:

* Individual -- Interaction -- Society: boundaries and transitions between the different forms of memories
* Metaphors, terms and forms of social memories and their conditions of formation
* Influence of social differentiation on social remembrance (generations, classes, cultural pluralisation, gender, etc.)
* Transformation of social memories (interdependency of social transformations, processes and social memories)
* Facticity, authenticity and the realm of experience
* Media, discourse and their functions for remembrance
* Re-presentations of the past (body memory, rituals, sites of remembrance, etc.)
* Social and individual practices of remembrance
* Transgenerational transmission and breaches of tradition
* Remembrance and oblivion between institution, power and ideology

The conference languages will be English and German. The presentations are intended to be published in a special volume of a sociological journal after the conference.

Deutsch

Germany and the Ghosts of the Past

Note: for more on the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, I recommend the film The Lives of Others (link to the right, under "Film and TV").

From: The New York Times

December 10, 2009
Letter from Europe
Ghosts of Past Haunt Politics in Germany
By JUDY DEMPSEY

Last week, the past caught up with the German state of Brandenburg. Several legislators belonging to the Left Party, the successor to the Communist Party, admitted to collaborating with the East German secret police. Astonishingly, their past had never been an issue in the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That began to change when Matthias Platzeck, the popular Social Democrat premier of this poor state, decided three months ago to drop the conservative Christian Democrats as his coalition partners in favor of the Left Party. He said the Left could no longer be stigmatized, especially since it had won 27 percent of the votes during elections last September.

As soon as the coalition was sworn into office, the facts began to creep out. Seven of the 26 Left Party legislators had worked for the Stasi. Some have since resigned. Others are sitting it out. Not Mr. Platzeck. He called for a reckoning with the past. “Since 1990, there has been no systematic Stasi check of any deputies in the Brandenburg Parliament,” he told Parliament last Friday. “We must admit, and I, too, must personally admit, that this was a mistake.”

It was the Social Democrats who since 1990 have governed this state, mostly in coalition with the conservative Christian Democrats. During much of that time, the premier was Manfred Stolpe. He had been a leading member of East Germany’s Lutheran Church and as such had regularly met Stasi agents. Despite repeated allegations, Mr. Stolpe denied he was an informer. But as premier, he never asked questions about the credentials of the legislators or civil servants.

Nor, for that matter, did Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. Jörg Schönbohm, until recently Brandenburg’s conservative interior minister, did not even check the background of the police. Documents released earlier this year showed that hundreds of them had been full-time Stasi officials or informers during the Communist era.

“It was a cartel of silence in Brandenburg,” said Ulrich Mählert, historian at the government-funded Foundation for the Reappraisal of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany. “It was about realpolitik.”

The revelations in Brandenburg have repercussions for Germany’s Social Democrats, in opposition since a catastrophic defeat in federal elections last September. The party now will have to decide what alliance, if any, it wants with the Left Party in order to challenge Mrs. Merkel’s coalition of conservatives and Free Democrats in 2013. One thing is certain: if the Social Democrats choose an alliance on the federal level with the Left, the past of each Left legislator will be scrutinized. As in Brandenburg, that could leave a very poisoned political atmosphere.

The existence of the secret police files continues to fuel a debate not only in Germany but across Eastern Europe. Even some who opposed the Communists say that keeping the files open will taint the political class because they can be abused for political purposes. Others say politics will never recover from the poison if the files are kept shut away.

“If you do not open the files fully and place them under independent control, the system will remain poisoned,” said Monica Macovei, a former justice minister in Romania who fought against corruption and the continuing influence of the Securitate, or secret police. “Former collaborators are not the people to build a democracy.”

Romania’s files were only opened in 2005 — 15 years after Germany’s and the Czech Republic’s. Only a handful of the two million files have reached the courts. The political parties decide which cases to pursue. Even then, judges are not always independent. “There are so many networks where people protect or blackmail each other,” Ms. Macovei said. “That is why I cannot agree to say ‘enough is enough’ when it comes to the issue of closing the files.” Ms. Macovei, despite — or perhaps because of — her commitment to openness, was fired weeks after Romania joined the European Union in 2007. She is now a conservative member of the European Parliament.

The situation is not much better in neighboring Bulgaria, where successive governments since 1989 have done little to keep former collaborators or secret police agents from holding top government jobs. When it was disclosed a few years ago that President Georgi Parvanov was an informer, there were some calls for his resignation. He is still in power. There are no sanctions barring former collaborators from holding public office. Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who was elected last July, has vowed to adopt tougher measures in order to end corruption and strengthen democracy. Progress has been slow.

“The political elites are not trusted,” said Daniel Smilov, program director of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia. “But there is a growing consensus that former secret service agents should be kept from public office. There is also a need for a thorough analysis of the past.”

Yet there is always the fear that the files will be used for partisan goals.

Alexander Smolar, president of the independent Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw, said that when Poland’s Communists and Solidarity agreed to share power in 1989, members of the Solidarity leadership opted for reconciliation instead of a witch hunt against their former persecutors.

A law was passed in 1997 requiring officials holding public office to declare whether they had worked for the secret police. It involved about 22,000 people. Four years ago, the conservative-nationalist government led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski (and a former Solidarity activist) sought to widen the net to include up to one million people.

“The whole issue has become highly politicized and poisonous,” Mr. Smolar said. “There are names of innocent people in those files because the secret police and informers wrote down how much they wanted to recruit them. The past is so complex.”

It is also very ambiguous. Despite that, back in Brandenburg, Mr. Platzeck has opted to confront the past — for the victims. “We need a Brandenburg in which nobody has the impression that he may be permanently pushed aside, excluded or forgotten,” he said last week. “This concerns, explicitly and foremost, the victims of East Germany’s Communist Party dictatorship.”

E-MAIL jdempsey@iht.com