Blog Reflection #1: We’ve looked at examples—representational texts—of how history and testimony “remember” the Holocaust. Considering one or more of our “reflective questions,” what thoughts, wisdom, questions, insights has this examination so far evoked?
In her essay titled “Primo Levi: The Craft of Narration,” Rita Wilson writes, “Perhaps more than any other human activity, narrating represents the inexhaustible burden of interpretation: ‘returning’ to experiences and events in order to understand them” (33). Keeping in mind one of the reflection question posed by our class (How does memory influence reality?), Wilson’s assertion that narration ‘returns’ one to the actual experience seems like an important point to ponder. While traumatic moments can indeed invoke the horrifying effects immediately, more often, the consequences of trauma appear later – possibly in the very act of remembering them. It is important to note here that memories of events may be selective, and thus depending on the memory itself, trauma is experienced differently. By extension, “reality” becomes inconsistent. Despite the possible loss of “raw material” in the act of remembering, the value of representing memory in various forms of narration is a critical function in the act of understanding. In the words of Michael Bernard-Donals, who has explained it better than I ever could, “It is not just the call to understand the ways in which what has been lost to memory affects the writing both of testimony and of the histories that make use of it as its raw material. It is also the call to understand the ways in which that effort at retrieval – sometimes exceedingly selective, sometimes careless or mightily subjective – creates something other than memory, something new, and something perhaps tenuously related to what took place” (Forgetful Memory 3). So, how does memory influence reality? The answer is subjective. The concept of memory is just as disparate as the concept of reality. But, in the very personal act of remembering, a unique “reality” is formed. While “reality” differs from person to person, the idea of “collective reality” is not as cynical. Collective memory, that is the remembrance of a common tragedy experienced by a group of people, directly influences the reality of this community. This is perhaps more true of a dispersed populace, such as the Jews or the Armenians. Therefore, for Diasporas spread around the world, the narration of a traumatic historical event becomes more than a personal connection to the past. It becomes, also, a symbol of national identity. The various stories shared by the Holocaust and Genocide survivors become deeply entrenched in the collective memories of future generations, no matter how scattered they may be around the planet.
The group presenting on Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz pointed out that Levi most likely committed suicide. This links strongly back with the question of how reality and memory are interlinked. Without the Holocaust, the life that Levi would have led remains a mystery. He was obviously affected strongly by his experiences at Auschwitz, and those experiences no doubt influenced how he saw everyday life. Although I can only guess as to his thought patterns, I imagine that he awoke at least some mornings thinking of the Holocaust, and that those thoughts at least sometimes colored how he saw the world the rest of the day.
To go beyond Levi to the more general question -- as I cannot guess Levi's thoughts -- it seems apparent that our current attitudes shape how we see the world. If we're in a good mood, mankind seems gentle. The song "When You Are Strange" by The Doors speaks to this idea; our view of the world affects how we see everyone else. It affects, in a way, our reality. For Levi, I imagine it was the same. Perhaps he saw mankind as more tainted than he did before Auschwitz.
This is, of course, only speculation as no one knows Levi's thought processes. However, I imagine that this must have been the case, especially considering some of his writings in Survival at Auschwitz .
Before I actually address the prompt, I'd like to let you guys know that the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is in fact not open yet, but will be Oct. 16th. My Fiancé and I decided to visit it this past weekend and after circling the area for approximately an hour, we spotted a family leaving where the museum/ monument should have been . Upon asking them how to get in, a man by the name of Ron i believe introduced himself as the architect. It just so happened that he had been discussing with museum coordinators the recording of interactive devices that are going to be used to enhance the experience itself. In any case, don't try to go, it's closed . :) .
All of that aside, I am particularly interested in the question: can memory and knowledge be exclusive of one another? I kept that in mind this past week while reading Shoah as well as the essays and was surprised how, initially I thought not. However, after reading James E. Young's "Holocaust Video and Cinemagraphic Testimony", I was surprised how in essence I disagreed with myself. What was central to this change? The concept of mediation. This is powerfully present in Shoah when reading/ watching the survivor testimonies. It became clear to me that when Lanzmann asked questions of his subjects in French and it had to be translated into Polish / yiddish and back again into French and eventually funneled into English subtitles that, "English serves as much as mediation between [the survivor] and experiences as it does a medium for their expression". It was interesting to see/read into the pause after each question was asked before it was answered. The entirety of the response relies solely on what is NOT being said. If a survivor feels for whatever reason, personal, traumatic, etc. that they simply wish to leave something out, the memory the relay is incomplete; we can never know it. It think that it is important to keep in mind what is being said but often times more importantly, what is being withheld. If we can never truly hear all sides to every story then how is it possible to ever know the experience of the holocaust?
In considering the readings from this week, I found this reflection question the most interesting. How does memory influence reality? Well, when we look at what we've reflected, what we see in the text of Shoah, what we learn is memory influences reality as a lingering effect of consciousness. Memory seems to reflect (when in reference to the tragedy of the Holocaust) a reality of something that cannot be forgotten. In the text of Shoah memory seems to be strong, strong and perserverent.
The idea that memory can define you as a person, or for the case of Primo Levi, redefine your personality, is an intriguing notion that I had not previously pondered. In Levi’s case, as with other survivors that I saw on video, the experience of the Holocaust gave them a purpose in life. These survivors felt an obligation to tell of their experience so that others would not deny or forget about the atrocities. For some of the survivors, it became a life mission to write and speak of their experience and that of what they witnessed; giving their memories an outlet and their lives a meaning beyond simple survival. The redefinition of the word “survival” also has presented me with a new concept of the word. “Survival” used to mean those who lived to be liberated from the camps or saw the end of the war, but after several readings, I have realized that documentaries and testimonies have been tailored to make it seem that those events were the happy endings. To say that the real trouble for the survivors began after liberation was something I had never imagined. With modern knowledge of post-traumatic-stress disorder, I am now able to understand why some survivors killed themselves or made statements like Ilse’s: “I did not want to be alive. I should have died.” I realize now that the word “survive” is not synonymous with “living” or “alive,” but “breathing.” True surviving is being able to regain one’s humanity and live normally.
In reflecting on the readings we’ve completed and the questions that have been presented to the class, I’ve come to find the matter of understanding somebody’s experience, though I may not know them, to be captivating. Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and Claude Lanzmann’s text, Shoah, relay multiple experiences of survivors, allowing the reader an opportunity to more fully appreciate the unexplainable occurrences of the Holocaust. Having completed both texts, I find – unlike my previous stance – that I not only empathize with the narratives, but also feel the pain inflicted on survivors. Being inundated with these narratives, the shift began from believing one cannot truly understand the experiences to concluding that the Holocaust, as an unexplainable event, allows for the same confusion and miscomprehension of the experience that Jews had. A passage of an occurrence that struck me as incomprehensible is in Shoah: Filip Muller, in his discussion of the gas chambers, says, “It was instinctive, a death struggle. Which is why children and weaker people, and the aged, always wound up at the bottom… Once also sometimes saw that the people lying on the ground, because of the pressure of the others, were unrecognizable. Children had their skulls crushed” (Lanzmann 115-16). It’s been explained that to watch something like this requires a person to be “dead,” unfeeling. I wont go as far as to say I felt “dead” when trying to comprehend, but I did feel a disconnect within myself at the horror of the situation. This disconnect is, quite possibly, the beginnings of my ability to, more or less, “experience the pain.”
I honestly have felt strongly about not being able to really experience something that didn't happen to me. It is not the lack of hurt or shock or pain that I cannot relate to, I feel deeply about that all, but it is simply that no one can ever know unless they experience those events and have those memories themselves of what happened. In this way, memory plays such an integral part in recalling events and unless you actually had that experience, you do not have that memory, that kind of reality of it. I am not saying that what we read cannot be a valid rhetoric but instead it is extremely valuable in that it may be the best way we can come close to imagine the horror and maybe let it live in us from generation to generation in order to prevent this from ever happening again. Interestingly enough, as I posted on my Shoah reflection, that book was the closest to experiencing the trauma yet. I had to read it but was hating life because it brought out the experience so vividly that it became uncomfortable and depressing.
The original nostalgia, the Greek return (nostos) merged with Greek suffering (algos), gives us a much more challenging perspective of the past than the warm and cozy one we have today. In romantic languages like Spanish the current nostalgia derives from the Latin 'ignorare' (to lack, to miss, or not to know). If these terms are taken together, then, we have a past at once unsettling and unsettled; the pain of not knowing; 'the agony of an unappeased return'. It's in this sense, I think, the ancient sense of the Greeks and the Romans, that Jean Baudrillard says, 'when the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia takes its true form.' Whatever experiences constitute our reality, the paradox is having to leave the thing in order to feel it (i.e. see Kenneth Koch's beautiful poem 'The Circus', a personal favorite).
Like the Friedlander article on narrative & historiography, last week's review from the NYR concerns the impossibility of Holocaust history. The article tells us that all scholars have either consulted 'direct' German sources (thereby effectively choosing to let Hitler 'shape their version of history' to some degree) or else they have avoided direct sources and looked elsewhere for their story. In either case, it is the victims who suffer an especially inadequate representation. This, their inscrutable silence, is the greatest source of our nostalgia for these victims. It is a source greater than the scrupulous archiving and record-taking of the SS and far greater than the more doubtful testimony of other European nations.
Outspoken Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi are curious exiles. But they are not entirely different from many of us who feel too removed from the past to see it with any clarity. We might say that we live with these survivors as strange bedfellows, estranged from them only slightly less than they are from their own trauma. Emily Dickinson diagnoses this sort of general estrangement when she writes: 'We dip our feet in foreign shores, haunted by native lands.' While hers, of course, is a quieter condition, the exile of any sort is sure to ask over and over, his back to the wind and sun, 'What is happening in my native land? When can I return?' The exile cannot return; he cannot ever know the old land in the same way, not anymore. The ex-lover, too, in any age, considers questions along these lines.
The case of trauma victims is no exception to this thinking. Neither is our attitude toward them. It's undeniable that the Holocaust has outlasted other genocides, taken fashionable and concrete shape in our collective minds; and this is no doubt due to the unique precision of its documentation. Still, I have to contend that our nostalgia for the victims lies precisely in the nostalgia of what - or whose voice - is missing... It lies in that of which we are ignorant, at least in terms of the stories available to us. ....
...In watching Film Unfinished, the crux of its impact on me lies in the conspicuous fact that the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto are given no voice at all. It strikes me that this darker unreality may explain why the SS filmmakers are so vexed at their prisoners for not nailing the scene that they want. The crew had often ventured 50 takes or more to get what they needed because they cannot stage what's already acting out its struggle, what's struggling precisely to perform, and what's entirely emptied of life already. (This is to say nothing of the 184 calories of energy the Jews in Warsaw ghettos were, on average, given).
When the film zooms in on the spectral victim, eyes unfixed and glazed over, you feel as though you're gazing into an animal abyss, into an ether of some kind, certainly not at a person. The film makes you complicit in the making of the film, aligning you (and itself) with the oriiginal filmmakers of the SS. All its shots of the deserted movie theaters point out to you accusingly, you with your wish to come to terms or narrativize, to historicize. It accuses you of re-member-ing (as with phantom limbs). Perhaps, in fact, it wants to suggest that Jews today shouldn't say 'Never forget', but rather 'forget your forgetting'. And the film has a point. There is no trace of these victims, and most of our institutionally infused memory seems little more than a misguided impulse. All of this comprises the dangerous process we engage in anytime we try to remember or file away the experience of others. Robert Pinsky asks that there be a word for the simultaneous process of remembering and forgetting; these need not be acts necessarily exclusive of each other. In the very act of archiving we can perceive the urge to destroy and to preserve. Whether by the SS, an Israeli filmmaker, or American audiences, to archive is to forget/destroy through memory. The documents they record or produce amount to paradoxical monuments of mediation...As non-moral commitments, as aversions to genuine investment.
For all these reasons and others, I personally turn to fiction as a refuge...It suits me well and understands the always dubious process of my remembering. Fiction after all, not reality, is what gives nostalgia its true form. For me, artists are to be commended first of all for their commitment to lost rooms in abandoned places. (Consider, for instance, why peeping-toms are never praised for their keenness of observation, as are novelists or bird-watchers...at least that's the way I recall the lines from Auden). Like Film Unfinished, the recent film Boy with the Striped Pajamas makes me feel guilty for wishing to peer into the gas chambers at the end. But it makes me more uneasy that I'm not able to. Best of its triumphs is the way the movie compels me to care more about the aryan boy (the clear protagonist) than about his deliberately undeveloped Jewish friend, of whom I know next to nothing. If I cry at the film's close, it's for myself, to the extent that I identify with the goyum, and to the extent that I hardly think twice about any of the supporting (read: semitic) cast of characters. At least I've recognized, as the camera pans out, the incredible distance of native lands; I've been reminded that remembering is little more than a theory, and that the cartography of my storied memory will forever be limited.
In taking a look at all of the readings we have done so far, what can be said is that memory has affected us all in what we choose to remember and forget. When looking back at our viewing of Shoah, I was not able to fully grasp the harshness of the Holocaust until viewing Abraham Bomba's testimony. His words were able to affect me in such a way, that it was as if I had never known of the Holocaust before. His memory of what he saw and did during those hard times is what we as students cherish. To have interviews done in such a way that pushes the interviewee to answer hard questions is why we are able to connect ourselves with these individuals, and the historical events that they are discussing. For some of us watching these testimonies and interviews being done is what makes the experience all the more real. While watching Bomba turn quiet, with tears filling his eyes, I felt as if I was standing right next to him. I too felt the pain and hurt that he was feeling, and I believe that these documentaries are why we are able to feel so connected with the Holocaust and those who survived. Before taking this class I felt that I knew and understood all that could be taken away from the Holocaust. Little did I know that I was very wrong. There is so much more to learn about this time in history. Questions such as why the pain will never really leave the hearts, and minds of the survivors; and why memory has played an important factor in what we choose to take with us in the end, is what we are always asking ourselves. The stories that we have been reading thus far has given us all a better understanding of what it must have been like for these victims, but in the end we can never really know what these individuals must have felt. What always comes back to me when discussing the cruelty behind what was done during this time is Anne Frank’s quote in which she states; “"... in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again." When learning about certain historical periods such as the Holocaust, the only thing that can really be taken away from it all is to learn from our past mistakes and as Anne Frank states so eloquently, to never lose faith, and hope that one day “peace and tranquility will return again”.
One of the questions which most interest me is the role which collective memory has in the creation and maintenance of socio-political power structures. One of the texts which most clearly captured the relationship between memory and socio-politics is Shoa in its portrayal of the Polish village of Treblinka and its current Polish residents. Although the example of the Polish villagers is amongst the most poignant examples of the structure of economy which resulted from the mass extermination of the Jews, it is by no means the only example. It is my belief that memory of traumatic events cannot be divorced from socio-political implications and effects. In other words, traumatic events of an international scale such as the Holocaust and Chernobyl have direct socio-political ramifications upon the victims and the individuals who are designated to benefit from such disasters. In Shoa, socio-politics in relation to the holocaust are most clearly illustrated in Lanzmann’s interviews with Polish residents of Treblinka. In his interviews with the current residents of the small village, the displacement of property—property which once belonged to Jewish inhabitants—is now in the hands of Polish residents. Some of them are fully aware of the nightmarish pedigree of their tainted inheritance while others (either unconsciously or intentionally) are unaware of the history of their property. In this way, Lanzmann is able to expose the system of proprietal entitlement and wealth which “the final solution” was design to secure for those deemed worthy of existing. Moreover, as discussed in James E. Young’s The Texture of Memory, “if societies remember, it is only insofar as their institutions and rituals organize, shape, even inspire their constituents’ memories.” In other words, societal collected memory (as Young refers to an aggregated assortment of sometimes conflicting memories which create collective meaning) cannot exist or function outside of the state apparatus, its governing functions, or institutions. Societal memory thus cannot be divorced from the goals of the society which produces it. While individual memory may supply an intimate meaning, in relation to society there is only political memory.
One of the things that comes to my attention when we discuss memory is that does memory protect us? Do we sometimes remember only certain experiences and not others? In the readings that we have done in this class I can honestly say that the Primo Levi book was a difficult read. I also appreciate the fact that he did not delve into too much detail about his experience. He wrote what he remembered but he also spared his audience the details, but his choice of words almost said everything without being explicit. Also the duel remembrance that victims share that in the article "The Texture of Memory," the author states that "at some point it may even be the activity of remembering together that becomes the shared memory; once ritualized, remembering together becomes an event in itself that is to be shared and remembered." Having a memorial site that brings groups of people together to share in their narratives is a common link that these victims have. Sometimes people like to remember the same thing someone else remembers. Perhaps we fall victim to memory when it is at the hand of someone else's memory. I believe that any memory shared or individualized should be taken as fact and we should be empathic to the remembrance of the event and its victim.
The books, articles and watching the films have been very difficult. The interviews were spellbinding. When I watched the interviews I could not take my eyes off of the speaker. Her memories were so vivid and she spoke so honestly it was riveting. We are lucky we have memories because these memories need to be voiced.
Can we share in the pain of someone else’s memories even if they have nothing to do with us?
This, I believe, is the central question in the study of the Holocaust. If we cannot share in the pain of unknown others, than the “lessons” of the Holocaust will surely be lost to future generations. In the miniseries Holocaust, the Weiss family experiences practically every horror visited on Jews during the war. The miniseries is problematic in many ways, and this is one of them; it decreases the terror of any single event on an individual soul. Yet, one can understand the conundrum of the filmmakers – to omit any facet of the suffering might be seen as discounting it.
We saw in the newsreels released after the war in the U.S. that the omission of facts, such as the targeting of Jews, creates a total misunderstanding of the Holocaust. These newsreel presentations were, most likely, based on a decision made by American political and media powers for reasons of propaganda and anti-Semitism. Perhaps it was thought that Americans would not share in the pain of “others,” as Jews were thought to be at that time. Perhaps they were trying to be paternally protective of the public.
At this point in time, it seems that the entire civilized world is shaken by the atrocities inflicted on innocents during World War II. I believe that this is due to the universality of the suffering inherent in human existence, and the secret fear that one may have valued one’s own survival enough to become as brutal as the persecutors or as silent as the witnesses. The Holocaust shines a light on the darkest corners of humanity’s soul – it shows us how little modern civilization can protect us from ourselves. The extremity of the pain the Holocaust inflicted makes it hard to fathom, yet we feel it, and we fear it – as we should -- because we can share in the pain of unknown others.
While watching Imaginary Witness I feel as though my understanding of how we deal with reality in terms of the everyday experience alongside memory was captured in the film The Pawn Broker. This is a story of a Holocaust survivor who is trying to move on with his life but everyday experiences bring back small visions or small memories that haunt him. For me this was the essence of understanding traumatic memory and how that memory is subsided by the everyday yet emerges within the everyday. We can’t control our cognitive responses much like we can’t control outside forces. One scene I remember from the brief introduction to the film was this man many years after the Holocaust walking down a dark street and hearing a dog bark which instantly brought back the memory of a dog barking at him when he disembarked the train at the concentration camp.
It seems that memory can overpower and transcend time, distance, setting, and even people. In terms of accurate representation or historical accuracy this is where perception is flawed, while memory can transcend time that is only in small snapshots. A Holocaust survivor may be able to see a sign and remember a story about that sign but they would not be able to recount everyday in it’s entirety.
Another thought that I found interesting was the choice of telling one’s story in another language as a way of disconnecting from the material. Individuals had remained silenced for so many years that when they did speak they had to distance themselves from the reliving that experience again. After watching a few testimonials, some individuals did this by speaking in a different language, omitting parts of their stories, stopping in the middle of their story and choosing to end the interview. Memory can be repressed but it is eventually sparked and triggered by something, it is a powerful tool that can haunt as well as help.
I am interested in whether the telling of the survivor’s stories is more of a moral obligation to society or as a way of vocalizing an experience as to reduce the pain of the memory that it has attached to it. Additionally, when telling their story there is the question of accuracy, but in this case is that really important? Do we need to know exact details of an event through one person's experience to understand the trauma that their memory of that event has caused them and continues? I think back on some of these testimonials and they stick with me, I remember their words but I can only experience their pain and their suffering through what parts of their memory do indeed remember.
Can the memory self regulate what it chooses to remember? Why are some parts of an event remembered and others gone forever?
When a person thinks of how memory may influence reality they may begin to look at their own life and begin to see how memory has shaped their lives. They may find that a certain event in their life that was traumatic or otherwise may have either made them a stonger person or perhaps left them weak and afraid of what their current reality is. If someone was involved in a horrible car wreck they may live in a current reality were they are constantly afraid of getting inside an automobile. This fear could simply stem from their past memory being so negative. This notion can be related with the text Shoah. This text really attempted to show that the horrors of what occured in the Holocaust can never be forgotten nor should it be. The memory is constantly reflected in the text and shows that it is never to be forgotten. It is quite powerful in shaping the reality of today.
Blog Reflection #1:
ReplyDeleteWe’ve looked at examples—representational texts—of how history and testimony “remember” the Holocaust. Considering one or more of our “reflective questions,” what thoughts, wisdom, questions, insights has this examination so far evoked?
In her essay titled “Primo Levi: The Craft of Narration,” Rita Wilson writes, “Perhaps more than any other human activity, narrating represents the inexhaustible burden of interpretation: ‘returning’ to experiences and events in order to understand them” (33). Keeping in mind one of the reflection question posed by our class (How does memory influence reality?), Wilson’s assertion that narration ‘returns’ one to the actual experience seems like an important point to ponder. While traumatic moments can indeed invoke the horrifying effects immediately, more often, the consequences of trauma appear later – possibly in the very act of remembering them. It is important to note here that memories of events may be selective, and thus depending on the memory itself, trauma is experienced differently. By extension, “reality” becomes inconsistent. Despite the possible loss of “raw material” in the act of remembering, the value of representing memory in various forms of narration is a critical function in the act of understanding. In the words of Michael Bernard-Donals, who has explained it better than I ever could, “It is not just the call to understand the ways in which what has been lost to memory affects the writing both of testimony and of the histories that make use of it as its raw material. It is also the call to understand the ways in which that effort at retrieval – sometimes exceedingly selective, sometimes careless or mightily subjective – creates something other than memory, something new, and something perhaps tenuously related to what took place” (Forgetful Memory 3). So, how does memory influence reality? The answer is subjective. The concept of memory is just as disparate as the concept of reality. But, in the very personal act of remembering, a unique “reality” is formed.
ReplyDeleteWhile “reality” differs from person to person, the idea of “collective reality” is not as cynical. Collective memory, that is the remembrance of a common tragedy experienced by a group of people, directly influences the reality of this community. This is perhaps more true of a dispersed populace, such as the Jews or the Armenians. Therefore, for Diasporas spread around the world, the narration of a traumatic historical event becomes more than a personal connection to the past. It becomes, also, a symbol of national identity. The various stories shared by the Holocaust and Genocide survivors become deeply entrenched in the collective memories of future generations, no matter how scattered they may be around the planet.
The group presenting on Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz pointed out that Levi most likely committed suicide. This links strongly back with the question of how reality and memory are interlinked. Without the Holocaust, the life that Levi would have led remains a mystery. He was obviously affected strongly by his experiences at Auschwitz, and those experiences no doubt influenced how he saw everyday life. Although I can only guess as to his thought patterns, I imagine that he awoke at least some mornings thinking of the Holocaust, and that those thoughts at least sometimes colored how he saw the world the rest of the day.
ReplyDeleteTo go beyond Levi to the more general question -- as I cannot guess Levi's thoughts -- it seems apparent that our current attitudes shape how we see the world. If we're in a good mood, mankind seems gentle. The song "When You Are Strange" by The Doors speaks to this idea; our view of the world affects how we see everyone else. It affects, in a way, our reality. For Levi, I imagine it was the same. Perhaps he saw mankind as more tainted than he did before Auschwitz.
This is, of course, only speculation as no one knows Levi's thought processes. However, I imagine that this must have been the case, especially considering some of his writings in Survival at Auschwitz .
Hi class,
ReplyDeleteBefore I actually address the prompt, I'd like to let you guys know that the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is in fact not open yet, but will be Oct. 16th. My Fiancé and I decided to visit it this past weekend and after circling the area for approximately an hour, we spotted a family leaving where the museum/ monument should have been . Upon asking them how to get in, a man by the name of Ron i believe introduced himself as the architect. It just so happened that he had been discussing with museum coordinators the recording of interactive devices that are going to be used to enhance the experience itself. In any case, don't try to go, it's closed . :) .
All of that aside, I am particularly interested in the question: can memory and knowledge be exclusive of one another? I kept that in mind this past week while reading Shoah as well as the essays and was surprised how, initially I thought not. However, after reading James E. Young's "Holocaust Video and Cinemagraphic Testimony", I was surprised how in essence I disagreed with myself. What was central to this change? The concept of mediation. This is powerfully present in Shoah when reading/ watching the survivor testimonies. It became clear to me that when Lanzmann asked questions of his subjects in French and it had to be translated into Polish / yiddish and back again into French and eventually funneled into English subtitles that, "English serves as much as mediation between [the survivor] and experiences as it does a medium for their expression". It was interesting to see/read into the pause after each question was asked before it was answered. The entirety of the response relies solely on what is NOT being said. If a survivor feels for whatever reason, personal, traumatic, etc. that they simply wish to leave something out, the memory the relay is incomplete; we can never know it. It think that it is important to keep in mind what is being said but often times more importantly, what is being withheld. If we can never truly hear all sides to every story then how is it possible to ever know the experience of the holocaust?
How does memory influence reality?
ReplyDeleteIn considering the readings from this week, I found this reflection question the most interesting. How does memory influence reality? Well, when we look at what we've reflected, what we see in the text of Shoah, what we learn is memory influences reality as a lingering effect of consciousness. Memory seems to reflect (when in reference to the tragedy of the Holocaust) a reality of something that cannot be forgotten. In the text of Shoah memory seems to be strong, strong and perserverent.
The idea that memory can define you as a person, or for the case of Primo Levi, redefine your personality, is an intriguing notion that I had not previously pondered. In Levi’s case, as with other survivors that I saw on video, the experience of the Holocaust gave them a purpose in life. These survivors felt an obligation to tell of their experience so that others would not deny or forget about the atrocities. For some of the survivors, it became a life mission to write and speak of their experience and that of what they witnessed; giving their memories an outlet and their lives a meaning beyond simple survival.
ReplyDeleteThe redefinition of the word “survival” also has presented me with a new concept of the word. “Survival” used to mean those who lived to be liberated from the camps or saw the end of the war, but after several readings, I have realized that documentaries and testimonies have been tailored to make it seem that those events were the happy endings. To say that the real trouble for the survivors began after liberation was something I had never imagined. With modern knowledge of post-traumatic-stress disorder, I am now able to understand why some survivors killed themselves or made statements like Ilse’s: “I did not want to be alive. I should have died.” I realize now that the word “survive” is not synonymous with “living” or “alive,” but “breathing.” True surviving is being able to regain one’s humanity and live normally.
In reflecting on the readings we’ve completed and the questions that have been presented to the class, I’ve come to find the matter of understanding somebody’s experience, though I may not know them, to be captivating. Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and Claude Lanzmann’s text, Shoah, relay multiple experiences of survivors, allowing the reader an opportunity to more fully appreciate the unexplainable occurrences of the Holocaust. Having completed both texts, I find – unlike my previous stance – that I not only empathize with the narratives, but also feel the pain inflicted on survivors.
ReplyDeleteBeing inundated with these narratives, the shift began from believing one cannot truly understand the experiences to concluding that the Holocaust, as an unexplainable event, allows for the same confusion and miscomprehension of the experience that Jews had. A passage of an occurrence that struck me as incomprehensible is in Shoah: Filip Muller, in his discussion of the gas chambers, says, “It was instinctive, a death struggle. Which is why children and weaker people, and the aged, always wound up at the bottom… Once also sometimes saw that the people lying on the ground, because of the pressure of the others, were unrecognizable. Children had their skulls crushed” (Lanzmann 115-16). It’s been explained that to watch something like this requires a person to be “dead,” unfeeling. I wont go as far as to say I felt “dead” when trying to comprehend, but I did feel a disconnect within myself at the horror of the situation. This disconnect is, quite possibly, the beginnings of my ability to, more or less, “experience the pain.”
I honestly have felt strongly about not being able to really experience something that didn't happen to me. It is not the lack of hurt or shock or pain that I cannot relate to, I feel deeply about that all, but it is simply that no one can ever know unless they experience those events and have those memories themselves of what happened. In this way, memory plays such an integral part in recalling events and unless you actually had that experience, you do not have that memory, that kind of reality of it.
ReplyDeleteI am not saying that what we read cannot be a valid rhetoric but instead it is extremely valuable in that it may be the best way we can come close to imagine the horror and maybe let it live in us from generation to generation in order to prevent this from ever happening again.
Interestingly enough, as I posted on my Shoah reflection, that book was the closest to experiencing the trauma yet. I had to read it but was hating life because it brought out the experience so vividly that it became uncomfortable and depressing.
The original nostalgia, the Greek return (nostos) merged with Greek suffering (algos), gives us a much more challenging perspective of the past than the warm and cozy one we have today. In romantic languages like Spanish the current nostalgia derives from the Latin 'ignorare' (to lack, to miss, or not to know). If these terms are taken together, then, we have a past at once unsettling and unsettled; the pain of not knowing; 'the agony of an unappeased return'. It's in this sense, I think, the ancient sense of the Greeks and the Romans, that Jean Baudrillard says, 'when the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia takes its true form.' Whatever experiences constitute our reality, the paradox is having to leave the thing in order to feel it (i.e. see Kenneth Koch's beautiful poem 'The Circus', a personal favorite).
ReplyDeleteLike the Friedlander article on narrative & historiography, last week's review from the NYR concerns the impossibility of Holocaust history. The article tells us that all scholars have either consulted 'direct' German sources (thereby effectively choosing to let Hitler 'shape their version of history' to some degree) or else they have avoided direct sources and looked elsewhere for their story. In either case, it is the victims who suffer an especially inadequate representation. This, their inscrutable silence, is the greatest source of our nostalgia for these victims. It is a source greater than the scrupulous archiving and record-taking of the SS and far greater than the more doubtful testimony of other European nations.
Outspoken Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi are curious exiles. But they are not entirely different from many of us who feel too removed from the past to see it with any clarity. We might say that we live with these survivors as strange bedfellows, estranged from them only slightly less than they are from their own trauma. Emily Dickinson diagnoses this sort of general estrangement when she writes: 'We dip our feet in foreign shores, haunted by native lands.' While hers, of course, is a quieter condition, the exile of any sort is sure to ask over and over, his back to the wind and sun, 'What is happening in my native land? When can I return?' The exile cannot return; he cannot ever know the old land in the same way, not anymore. The ex-lover, too, in any age, considers questions along these lines.
The case of trauma victims is no exception to this thinking. Neither is our attitude toward them. It's undeniable that the Holocaust has outlasted other genocides, taken fashionable and concrete shape in our collective minds; and this is no doubt due to the unique precision of its documentation. Still, I have to contend that our nostalgia for the victims lies precisely in the nostalgia of what - or whose voice - is missing... It lies in that of which we are ignorant, at least in terms of the stories available to us.
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...In watching Film Unfinished, the crux of its impact on me lies in the conspicuous fact that the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto are given no voice at all. It strikes me that this darker unreality may explain why the SS filmmakers are so vexed at their prisoners for not nailing the scene that they want. The crew had often ventured 50 takes or more to get what they needed because they cannot stage what's already acting out its struggle, what's struggling precisely to perform, and what's entirely emptied of life already. (This is to say nothing of the 184 calories of energy the Jews in Warsaw ghettos were, on average, given).
ReplyDeleteWhen the film zooms in on the spectral victim, eyes unfixed and glazed over, you feel as though you're gazing into an animal abyss, into an ether of some kind, certainly not at a person. The film makes you complicit in the making of the film, aligning you (and itself) with the oriiginal filmmakers of the SS. All its shots of the deserted movie theaters point out to you accusingly, you with your wish to come to terms or narrativize, to historicize. It accuses you of re-member-ing (as with phantom limbs). Perhaps, in fact, it wants to suggest that Jews today shouldn't say 'Never forget', but rather 'forget your forgetting'. And the film has a point. There is no trace of these victims, and most of our institutionally infused memory seems little more than a misguided impulse. All of this comprises the dangerous process we engage in anytime we try to remember or file away the experience of others. Robert Pinsky asks that there be a word for the simultaneous process of remembering and forgetting; these need not be acts necessarily exclusive of each other. In the very act of archiving we can perceive the urge to destroy and to preserve. Whether by the SS, an Israeli filmmaker, or American audiences, to archive is to forget/destroy through memory. The documents they record or produce amount to paradoxical monuments of mediation...As non-moral commitments, as aversions to genuine investment.
For all these reasons and others, I personally turn to fiction as a refuge...It suits me well and understands the always dubious process of my remembering. Fiction after all, not reality, is what gives nostalgia its true form. For me, artists are to be commended first of all for their commitment to lost rooms in abandoned places. (Consider, for instance, why peeping-toms are never praised for their keenness of observation, as are novelists or bird-watchers...at least that's the way I recall the lines from Auden). Like Film Unfinished, the recent film Boy with the Striped Pajamas makes me feel guilty for wishing to peer into the gas chambers at the end. But it makes me more uneasy that I'm not able to. Best of its triumphs is the way the movie compels me to care more about the aryan boy (the clear protagonist) than about his deliberately undeveloped Jewish friend, of whom I know next to nothing. If I cry at the film's close, it's for myself, to the extent that I identify with the goyum, and to the extent that I hardly think twice about any of the supporting (read: semitic) cast of characters. At least I've recognized, as the camera pans out, the incredible distance of native lands; I've been reminded that remembering is little more than a theory, and that the cartography of my storied memory will forever be limited.
In taking a look at all of the readings we have done so far, what can be said is that memory has affected us all in what we choose to remember and forget. When looking back at our viewing of Shoah, I was not able to fully grasp the harshness of the Holocaust until viewing Abraham Bomba's testimony. His words were able to affect me in such a way, that it was as if I had never known of the Holocaust before. His memory of what he saw and did during those hard times is what we as students cherish. To have interviews done in such a way that pushes the interviewee to answer hard questions is why we are able to connect ourselves with these individuals, and the historical events that they are discussing. For some of us watching these testimonies and interviews being done is what makes the experience all the more real. While watching Bomba turn quiet, with tears filling his eyes, I felt as if I was standing right next to him. I too felt the pain and hurt that he was feeling, and I believe that these documentaries are why we are able to feel so connected with the Holocaust and those who survived. Before taking this class I felt that I knew and understood all that could be taken away from the Holocaust. Little did I know that I was very wrong. There is so much more to learn about this time in history. Questions such as why the pain will never really leave the hearts, and minds of the survivors; and why memory has played an important factor in what we choose to take with us in the end, is what we are always asking ourselves. The stories that we have been reading thus far has given us all a better understanding of what it must have been like for these victims, but in the end we can never really know what these individuals must have felt. What always comes back to me when discussing the cruelty behind what was done during this time is Anne Frank’s quote in which she states; “"... in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again." When learning about certain historical periods such as the Holocaust, the only thing that can really be taken away from it all is to learn from our past mistakes and as Anne Frank states so eloquently, to never lose faith, and hope that one day “peace and tranquility will return again”.
ReplyDeleteOne of the questions which most interest me is the role which collective memory has in the creation and maintenance of socio-political power structures. One of the texts which most clearly captured the relationship between memory and socio-politics is Shoa in its portrayal of the Polish village of Treblinka and its current Polish residents. Although the example of the Polish villagers is amongst the most poignant examples of the structure of economy which resulted from the mass extermination of the Jews, it is by no means the only example.
ReplyDeleteIt is my belief that memory of traumatic events cannot be divorced from socio-political implications and effects. In other words, traumatic events of an international scale such as the Holocaust and Chernobyl have direct socio-political ramifications upon the victims and the individuals who are designated to benefit from such disasters. In Shoa, socio-politics in relation to the holocaust are most clearly illustrated in Lanzmann’s interviews with Polish residents of Treblinka. In his interviews with the current residents of the small village, the displacement of property—property which once belonged to Jewish inhabitants—is now in the hands of Polish residents. Some of them are fully aware of the nightmarish pedigree of their tainted inheritance while others (either unconsciously or intentionally) are unaware of the history of their property. In this way, Lanzmann is able to expose the system of proprietal entitlement and wealth which “the final solution” was design to secure for those deemed worthy of existing.
Moreover, as discussed in James E. Young’s The Texture of Memory, “if societies remember, it is only insofar as their institutions and rituals organize, shape, even inspire their constituents’ memories.” In other words, societal collected memory (as Young refers to an aggregated assortment of sometimes conflicting memories which create collective meaning) cannot exist or function outside of the state apparatus, its governing functions, or institutions. Societal memory thus cannot be divorced from the goals of the society which produces it. While individual memory may supply an intimate meaning, in relation to society there is only political memory.
One of the things that comes to my attention when we discuss memory is that does memory protect us? Do we sometimes remember only certain experiences and not others? In the readings that we have done in this class I can honestly say that the Primo Levi book was a difficult read. I also appreciate the fact that he did not delve into too much detail about his experience. He wrote what he remembered but he also spared his audience the details, but his choice of words almost said everything without being explicit. Also the duel remembrance that victims share that in the article "The Texture of Memory," the author states that "at some point it may even be the activity of remembering together that becomes the shared memory; once ritualized, remembering together becomes an event in itself that is to be shared and remembered." Having a memorial site that brings groups of people together to share in their narratives is a common link that these victims have. Sometimes people like to remember the same thing someone else remembers. Perhaps we fall victim to memory when it is at the hand of someone else's memory. I believe that any memory shared or individualized should be taken as fact and we should be empathic to the remembrance of the event and its victim.
ReplyDeleteThe books, articles and watching the films have been very difficult. The interviews were spellbinding. When I watched the interviews I could not take my eyes off of the speaker. Her memories were so vivid and she spoke so honestly it was riveting. We are lucky we have memories because these memories need to be voiced.
Can we share in the pain of someone else’s memories even if they have nothing to do with us?
ReplyDeleteThis, I believe, is the central question in the study of the Holocaust. If we cannot share in the pain of unknown others, than the “lessons” of the Holocaust will surely be lost to future generations. In the miniseries Holocaust, the Weiss family experiences practically every horror visited on Jews during the war. The miniseries is problematic in many ways, and this is one of them; it decreases the terror of any single event on an individual soul. Yet, one can understand the conundrum of the filmmakers – to omit any facet of the suffering might be seen as discounting it.
We saw in the newsreels released after the war in the U.S. that the omission of facts, such as the targeting of Jews, creates a total misunderstanding of the Holocaust. These newsreel presentations were, most likely, based on a decision made by American political and media powers for reasons of propaganda and anti-Semitism. Perhaps it was thought that Americans would not share in the pain of “others,” as Jews were thought to be at that time. Perhaps they were trying to be paternally protective of the public.
At this point in time, it seems that the entire civilized world is shaken by the atrocities inflicted on innocents during World War II. I believe that this is due to the universality of the suffering inherent in human existence, and the secret fear that one may have valued one’s own survival enough to become as brutal as the persecutors or as silent as the witnesses. The Holocaust shines a light on the darkest corners of humanity’s soul – it shows us how little modern civilization can protect us from ourselves. The extremity of the pain the Holocaust inflicted makes it hard to fathom, yet we feel it, and we fear it – as we should -- because we can share in the pain of unknown others.
While watching Imaginary Witness I feel as though my understanding of how we deal with reality in terms of the everyday experience alongside memory was captured in the film The Pawn Broker. This is a story of a Holocaust survivor who is trying to move on with his life but everyday experiences bring back small visions or small memories that haunt him. For me this was the essence of understanding traumatic memory and how that memory is subsided by the everyday yet emerges within the everyday. We can’t control our cognitive responses much like we can’t control outside forces. One scene I remember from the brief introduction to the film was this man many years after the Holocaust walking down a dark street and hearing a dog bark which instantly brought back the memory of a dog barking at him when he disembarked the train at the concentration camp.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that memory can overpower and transcend time, distance, setting, and even people. In terms of accurate representation or historical accuracy this is where perception is flawed, while memory can transcend time that is only in small snapshots. A Holocaust survivor may be able to see a sign and remember a story about that sign but they would not be able to recount everyday in it’s entirety.
Another thought that I found interesting was the choice of telling one’s story in another language as a way of disconnecting from the material. Individuals had remained silenced for so many years that when they did speak they had to distance themselves from the reliving that experience again. After watching a few testimonials, some individuals did this by speaking in a different language, omitting parts of their stories, stopping in the middle of their story and choosing to end the interview. Memory can be repressed but it is eventually sparked and triggered by something, it is a powerful tool that can haunt as well as help.
I am interested in whether the telling of the survivor’s stories is more of a moral obligation to society or as a way of vocalizing an experience as to reduce the pain of the memory that it has attached to it. Additionally, when telling their story there is the question of accuracy, but in this case is that really important? Do we need to know exact details of an event through one person's experience to understand the trauma that their memory of that event has caused them and continues? I think back on some of these testimonials and they stick with me, I remember their words but I can only experience their pain and their suffering through what parts of their memory do indeed remember.
Can the memory self regulate what it chooses to remember? Why are some parts of an event remembered and others gone forever?
When a person thinks of how memory may influence reality they may begin to look at their own life and begin to see how memory has shaped their lives. They may find that a certain event in their life that was traumatic or otherwise may have either made them a stonger person or perhaps left them weak and afraid of what their current reality is. If someone was involved in a horrible car wreck they may live in a current reality were they are constantly afraid of getting inside an automobile. This fear could simply stem from their past memory being so negative. This notion can be related with the text Shoah. This text really attempted to show that the horrors of what occured in the Holocaust can never be forgotten nor should it be. The memory is constantly reflected in the text and shows that it is never to be forgotten. It is quite powerful in shaping the reality of today.
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