Center for Critical Inquiry and Cultural Studies

This paper looks at memory formation and the process of memorialization (or the lack of it) with regard to two cases of forced population movements in twentieth-century Europe: ethnic Germans during and after the Second World War, and the Romany populations following the Kosovo War of 1999. It uses the category 'refugee' as a means to compare the experiences of displaced persons across time and space and discuss the role of memorialization for communities struggling with Impunity. The paper provides a "linkage" of Schulze’s work as a historian and his current role as Director of the Human Rights Centre, i.e. it is linking history with human rights practice and in particular with issues of transitional justice. *This presentation is a "late addition" to the symposium program. Rainer Schulze is presenting his work at a conference in Milwaukee organized by the Critical Refugee Studies Network and he planned to be in Phoenix for a private visit from 5 to 12 November. He asked us a month ago to attend the ASU symposium as a guest visitor. Because of the last minute cancellation on our program, we were able to offer Professor Schulze’s an active role in the research session on Memory at War. Rainer U. W. Schulze, Professor of Modern European History and Director of the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex, UK, has worked extensively on memory and memorialization, both with regard to flight and expulsion of German populations after the Second World War, and with regard to the Holocaust (and in particular Bergen-Belsen concentration camp). He is the founding editor of the journal The Holocaust in History and Memory; in connection with his presentation, see Vol. 3 (2010): The Porrajmos: The "Gypsy Holocaust" and the Continuing Discrimination of Roma and Sinti after 1945, GENERAL EDITOR: Rainer Schulze with contributions from Ian Hancock (Austin, Texas), Donald Kenrick (London), Stephen Smith (Los Angeles), Janna Eliot (London), Gloria Buckley (Suffolk), Yvonne Robel/Kathrin Herold (Bremen) and others. For more information, please see http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/staff/profile.aspx?ID=1790; for the journal, please see http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/staff/profile.aspx?ID=1790 and http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/holocaust_memorial_week/.

Collective memory is the backbone of collective identity. But Collective memory is also constantly at risk, troubled by its less welcome aspects; and so, therefore, is collective identity. More fundamentally, there seems to be an elemental unease at the root – what Freud called an ‘Unbehagen in der Kultur’. Thus a nation fights to defend its collective memory and identity, as it fights to defend its territory or political structure. Karl Figlio is both a professor in the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, United Kingdom and a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist. With a previous background in biological sciences and the history and philosophy of science and medicine, he aims to bridge the gap between clinical psychoanalytic and social and epistemological enquiry, with an emphasis on masculinity. In his 2001 publication, Psychoanalysis, Science, and Masculinity, Figlio explores both the limitations and applications of science when looking for meaning about the psyche. “The language of psychoanalysis,” Figlio writes, “can sound as strange and far from ordinary experience as the language of natural science in comparison to everyday empirical reality.” Thus, Figlio works to incorporate the internal reflections of psychoanalysis with the external experimentation of science, bringing them into a conversation where both have a place in exploring the nature of the human psyche. He is currently working on collective memory and nationalism, against the background of Freud’s concept of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ and addresses issues related to this work in his lectures. In some cases, the disturbance to collective memory and identity is extreme, and it does not seem possible to reconstruct an acceptable, coherent, continuous account. It is as if there is a smudge so deep as to suggest an inherent flaw in collective character, something like an Unbehagen. Situations involving likeness, as in ethnic conflict and anti-Semitism, bring it out, as Freud noted in his concept of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’. In considering such a situation, I would shift the focus away from memory to the process of remembering; away from the fact of ‘true’ or ‘false’ memories, to the way that the collective grapples with its past. In this paper, I will explore the process of reconstructing a liveable account of German identity, which spans the Nazi period, and specifically Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Historians, sociologists, philosophers, theologians and novelists have contributed to understanding this horrific – what shall we call it: episode, perversion, deviation, spirit – in German history. I will look at one aspect, from a psychoanalytic angle. I will argue that remembering is a form of what the psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, called ‘reparation’, and that there is a traduced form of remembering-as-reparation, which psychoanalysts in the Kleinian tradition call ‘manic reparation’. They look the same, but reparation is based on guilt and concern for damage to the other, while manic reparation is based on narcissistic aggrandizement and contempt for the other. I think that these concepts allow a translation of understanding from clinical psychoanalysis into cultural analysis and that they throw light on the extreme difficulty of building a trusting environment for collective remembering, especially in the aftermath of atrocity. In both the clinical and the cultural situation, good intention can arouse suspicion of duplicity, which undermines the collaborative effort to secure a base of pride. A memorial to victims of war becomes a memorial for the SS. The concepts of reparation and manic reparation suggest a way to differentiate and characterize polarized accounts of post-war German remembering as properly making-better or as infiltrated by apologetics.

The Center for Jewish Studies (Tempe campus) and the Center for Critical Inquiry & Cultural Studies (CCICS, West campus), together with the faculty research cluster in Philosophy, Rhetoric & Literature convened an university-wide event with distinguished scholars from the United States and Europe who, together with scholars from ASU, discussed the relationship between trauma, memory, representation, memorialization and education. Contributing perspectives from a variety of geographical locales and transdisciplinary approaches, leading scholars of Holocaust studies reflected on conflicted sites of memory with specialists in genocide studies, postcolonial studies, East European Studies, Native American studies and trauma studies. Anticipating Arizona’s centennial celebration in 2012, the symposium also highlighted some of the Southwest’s legacies connected to global and local memory. This event was supported by an ACLS conference grant and all major program units in the humanities at ASU. This event was part of the Arizona State University Project Humanities 2011: “The Humanities at a Crossroads: Perspectives on Place.” See https://asunews.asu.edu/20111026_professor_memorysymposium "Professor rediscovers his past – and gains a new life, October 26, 2011."

Roundtable on Memory & Countermemory with Lewis R. Gordon, Berel Lang, Sarah Pessin, Gabriele M. Schwab, Sasha Etkind, and Simon Ortiz. Moderator: Patricia Huntington.

(Part 2 of the performance). A review by Kerry Lengel, The Arizona Republic, 5 Mar. 2009, kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com Born in the U.S. of Spanish and Portuguese descent, Joseph Garcia's cultural heritage is a diverse one - even more diverse than he knew while growing up in Panama. He was raised Catholic and served as an altar boy, but when the priests couldn't answer his questions about the tenets of the faith, he walked away from his religion at age 13.He still believed in God, though, and as an adult he began studying Hebrew, so he could better understand the Bible. At a family wedding, he told his great-uncle that the language was coming easily to him, almost as if he were a Jew. "And he said, 'Well, we are Jews,'" Garcia recalls. "I had no idea. You could have knocked me over with a feather." His family was descended from conversos, Spanish Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition five centuries ago. Many such families preserved their Sephardic Jewish traditions in secret, passing them on to some, but not all, of their children. They are now known as crypto-Jews - hidden Jews - and can be found both in Spain and Latin America, as well as here in the Southwest, especially New Mexico. Crypto-Jews are the subject of a new play, "Parted Waters," commissioned by Arizona Jewish Theatre Company for a world-premiere production this month. The story is about three generations of New Mexico Latinos. The grandfather finds spiritual sustenance in his secret religion, while his son refuses to acknowledge it. The youngest of the three has no idea of his hidden heritage - until a conflict in the family brings it out. Playwright Robert Benjamin, who lives in Los Alamos, N.M., did extensive research on crypto-Judaism in the state. "What surprised me was how much of a spectrum there is of experiences. There are people who embrace it, there are people for whom it is a curiosity, and other people for whom it is a life-changing experience" to discover something so unexpected about their family history. The central theme is identity, he adds. "The point I try to make is that people need to think about their cultural identity and make choices," he says. "It's not necessarily a given." Daniel Schay, who is directing the premiere production, says he liked the fact that the setup of the plot is unusual, but that it has a broader resonance. "They have a unique problem," he says. "It's not often you find everyday characters dealing with a hidden cultural heritage." At the same time, the double identity - Jewish and Latino - is just a more complicated variation the national story of a nation of immigrants. "The real question is, What does it mean to be an American? How do you preserve your spice in the melting pot, and that's true whether you're Jewish or Hispanic or whatever." Arizona Jewish Theatre's artistic director, Janet Arnold, commissioned the play both because she found the topic personally fascinating, but also because it was an opportunity to reach out to Latinos, an audience that doesn't often see itself represented on Valley stages. In crypto-Judaism she sees an opportunity to build bridges between communities. It's a bridge embodied by Garcia, who serves as rabbi of Avdey Torah Hayah, a synagogue for Spanish-speaking Jews in Chandler. Taking a cue from his mother, he's changed the pronunciation of his name, going by Yosef Garcia. "When I hear a name like that, it just warms the cockles of my heart," Arnold says. See: http://www.santafe.com/article/teatro-paraguass-production-of-robert-f.-benjamins-parted-waters

A play by Robert Benjamin and commissioned by the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company is about three generations of Hispanics struggling with their Crypto-Jewish ancestry. Benjamin wrote in the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society: “At one level the play is about passing the legacy from grandfather to grandson over the objection of the middle generation. At another level, the play explores differences in how people relate to their religious experiences.” Robert F. Benjamin, Ph.D. & playwright, New Mexico. The one-hour dramatic reading of Parted Waters is performed by actors of Arizona Jewish Theatre Company: Mark DeMichele, Michael Cortez, Andy Alcala, Jenn Taber. Producing Dir.: Janet Arnold; Co-prod., fine arts specialist at ASU-West campus: Charles St. Clair. Latino Jewish community in Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the U.S. Perhaps several hundred Latino Jews live among the 83,000 Jews in Greater Phoenix, according to Carlos Galindo-Elvira, a Latino Jew who is vice president of philanthropic and community relations for Valle del Sol, a social services agency. A fascinating discussion of Latino converts to Judaism, Jews from Mexico and “crypto Jews” (ancestors of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, who have maintained Jewish practices in secret over many generations) led to a concept that I had never entertained, undocumented Jewish Latinos.

This talk explores the double movement of memory raised by Afro-Jews on Passover, where Jewish identity is ritualized as memory of trauma and liberation in a context where black identity is pressured toward acts of forgetting. The contradictions of national memory, where modern life, exemplified especially in American doubled conceptions of self, pose problems of remembering and listening. The result is a demand for cultural ruin, a form of disaster, through the elimination of continuity, which hides deeper, existential challenges of maturation: ruin, after all, is a portended feature of human existence, where, in the face of nothing lasting forever, humanity faces the deeper anxiety of how to live with the eventual realization of the end of the world. Lewis R. Gordon is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Temple University. With a diverse background of Jamaican, Cuban, and Jewish ancestry, Gordon has applied himself to the task of articulating the interconnectivity of our world, beyond the strict binaries of Western cultural mores. With many written works in publication concerning post-colonial phenomenology, existentialism, race theory, and cultural studies, Gordon embraces the full breadth of his heritage, striving to engage in the infinite entities that blend to create the human identity. About his own writing, Gordon says in an interview with Linda Alcoff, “I write books to generate critical exchange and to learn from critics. People have always asked me how I write so much, but it is because I do not take the view that one writes a perfect text. I see my writing as part of the social world, so I write to get the discussions going.” His most recent publication with Jane Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age, examines the force of cultural icons and symbols to offer a theory of disaster in modern and contemporary life.

Memory is incalculably important to human culture and society—in fact, memory is the conceptual basis of Existence in the present--but to Indigenous American peoples, the importance is denied them. To a very large extent, a certain key memory is not existent for them. It is non-existent to them because it is the memory of the European invasion, occupation, and conquest of the Americas that cannot be openly reconstructed by them so it can be put on display publically for public discourse. This key memory has to do with European invasion and conquest of the Americas, i.e., the lands now known as the continents of North and South America that consist of the lands and the social-cultural-governance systems of the Indigenous peoples who live on the invaded and conquered lands and whose descendents continue to live on them. Vast amounts of Indigenous lands were violently stolen and untold millions of Indigenous peoples were left homeless and the social-cultural-governance systems were dismantled. Literally an untold amount of destruction was wrought. And this memory is not existent because it is denied in many and various ways by domineering Euro-Americans who now are the majority population of North and South America. While a portion of memory of European invasion and conquest is allowed in grand gestures of condescension and even allowed for Indigenous peoples to address to a degree, there has never been adequate redress consisting of true recognition of legal governmental sovereignty that assures Indigenous peoples full recognition they were initially the original and absolute sovereign human stewards of the Americas before the invasion, occupation, and theft and destruction of their lands and way of life. When Euro-Americans have recognized, mostly in condescension, that Indigenous peoples—usually addressed and “recognized” by the misnomer “Indians”—were and are the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas they have done so in an obligatory way that has had no formal internationally legal effect. Instead, that recognition has been dismally minimal and that style and manner of recognition has been rejected in the greater part by Indigenous American peoples. The effect has resulted in Indigenous Americans literally having no memory of their original, overall sovereignty over the continental lands now known as North and South America. The colonial condescension is rejected and its memory, if any, is also. Ortiz is a distinguished Professor of Indigenous Literature at Arizona State University, a native of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, a poet, fiction writer, essayist and storyteller. He is the author of over twenty books on Indigenous liberation and de-colonization, poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and children’s literature. His publications include Woven Stone, Out There Somewhere, from Sand Creek, After and Before the Lightning, The Good Rainbow Road, Men on the Moon, and others. "Memory, History, and the Present," a long poem. He is currently at work with Gabriele M. Schwab on a work of memory—for lack of a better term--titled Children of Fire, Children of Water. His courses of study focus on decolonization of Indigenous people's land, culture, and community. With literary perspective as a guide, research interests include cultural, social, political dynamics of Indigenous peoples of North, Central, and South America. Ortiz's publications in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, essay, and children's literature reflect his literary perspective across a range of his varied, active engagement and involvement in contemporary Indigenous life and literature. His publications, research, varied experience and intellectual participation is the basis of his engaging approach to the study of-involvement-engagement with Indigenous literature and its place in the canon of world literatures.

While Europeans talk about the “mnemonic age” and the obsession with the past around the globe, Russians complain about the historical “amnesia” in their country. My current project reveals that Russian authors and filmmakers have been obsessed by the work of mourning. They do so in novels, films, and other forms of culture that reflect, shape, and possess people’s memories. I believe that the asymmetry of Memory Studies across Europe should be understood as a political challenge rather than a natural divide. Russia’s leaders are shifting the country’s ‘chosen trauma’ away from the crimes of Stalinism to the collapse of the USSR, which Vladimir Putin called ‘the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century’. This shift at once casts the millions of victims of Soviet terror as unworthy of mourning (or ‘ungrievable,’ in Judith Butler’s parlance) and invites Russians to mourn the state that murdered them. The uncanny scenery of post-Soviet literature and film signals the failure of other, more conventional ways of understanding social reality. This failure and this scenery are nothing new, though post-Soviet conditions exacerbated the wild character of these phantasms. No Iron Curtain has separated Russians from their past. The trauma of the Great Terror of the 1930s, which was essentially a collective suicide of the political and cultural elite of the country, produced cyclical after-shocks that marked the subsequent decades of Russian history. From the return of the Gulag prisoners in the 1950s to the first dissidents of the 1960s, to the grand Soviet film-making of the 1970s, to the archival revelations of the 1980s, to what I call the “magical historicism” of post-Soviet culture, the ghosts of Stalinism and its victims have been stubbornly haunting Russian culture. Inhabiting culture as their ecological niche, the undead constitute a particular kind of collective memory, which becomes prominent when more reliable forms of this memory, such as museums, monuments, or historical textbooks, betray the dead. Etkind is MAW Project Leader and Principal Investigator and Reader in Russian Literature and Cultural History in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. His current research interests include internal colonization in the Russian Empire, narratology from Pushkin to Nabokov and comparative studies of cultural memory. He is author of "Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror"; "Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory" (16/1 (2009): 182-200); Bare Monuments to Bare Life: The Soon-to-Be-Dead in Arts and Memory in "Gulag Studies" (Volume1, 2008: 27-33); "Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?" in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History" (6, 1 winter 2005: 171-186); Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (translated by Noah and Maria Rubens), published in Russian and translated into French, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Serbian and Bulgarian. Dr. Etkind's current group project is Memory at War, an international collaborative project investigating the cultural dynamics of the "memory wars" currently raging in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Employing a collaborative methodology grounded in the analytical and critical practices of the humanities, the project seeks to explore how public memory of 20th century traumas mediates the variety of ways in which East European nations develop in post-socialist space. The University of Cambridge is leading this project, which will be accomplished in association with the Universities of Bergen, Helsinki, Tartu and Groningen. The project was launched in 2010 and will run for three years.

The University of Denver’s Center for Judaic Studies is creating a Holocaust Memorial Social Action Site which honors memory through the active cultivation of social justice activities on campus. In this spirit, the site’s boundary is marked with the Hebrew “Hineni,” “Here I am,” a Levinasian call to enacting memory through ethical engagement and response. In this paper, I explore the Levinasian conception of memory and ethics that frames this project, as I also explore the theoretical limits of any counter-memorial that operates within the parameters of the “art world.” Our project is a counter-memorial that privileges ethics; we have used relatively few dollars for the material space and have moved away from a search for an artist; instead we have earmarked the majority of funds for programs and for an eventual Endowed Chair of Holocaust Studies and Social Justice. In the spirit of James Young’s reminder that the history of the memorial itself functions as an integral part of the memorial, I also talk, in the paper, about the journey in this particular project from aesthetics to ethics (in the recounting of our process of hiring a well-known artist and then finding our way instead to a series of interfaith and social justice projects on the campus). Sarah Pessin is Associate Professor of Philosophy, the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies, and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver. Sarah works on topics in Jewish and Islamic philosophy, Neoplatonisms, medieval philosophies, comparative philosophies of religion, modern Jewish philosophy, and post-Holocaust theology. She is very active in interfaith and cross-cultural bridge-building, and is interested in the nature of the sacred and its relation to inter-human engagement and response. Sarah has published and presented widely, and has recently published the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Solomon Ibn Gabirol; she is currently working on a manuscript on that medieval Neoplatonist’s “Theology of Desire”, and she has forthcoming essays on Muslim philosophical conceptions of matter; Jewish, Muslim and Christian Platonisms; Hans Jonas’s “Theology of Risk,” and an essay exploring the Levinasian elements of DU’s new Holocaust Memorial Social Action Site (forthcoming in the Memory issue of the University of Toronto’s Journal of Jewish Studies).

The latter half of the twentieth century highlighted the failure of redemptive understandings of the Shoah. Dividing the history of Holocaust studies into separable periods, we may identify (1) a period of silence, in which the survivors endeavored to speak and few cared to listen (1945-1960); (2) a period in which redemptive narratives flourished, begun perhaps with the Eichmann trial, and represented in popular culture by an event like the TV production "Holocaust" (1960-1985); and (3) a period in which anti-redemptive narratives began to appear, marked for example by Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah, or the various stages of the so-called Historickerstreit, among other ways of engaging non-representational or anti-representational understandings--trauma studies, for example (1985-present). I wonder whether for the past ten years or so we have been broaching a fourth moment, one no longer focused exclusively upon either conscious or unconscious understandings but one that would include a new emphasis upon the structure of interpretation itself, and one in which the re-articulations of silences of the past, the activation of redemptive narratives, and the challenges to such interpretations (either in the form of anti-redemptive accounts or the invention of counter memory and counter redemptive accounts) would assume new significance in historiography, cultural analysis, literary analysis, and the modalities of memorialization. Sandor Goodhart is Director of Interdisciplinary Program in Classics, former Director of Jewish studies, and faculty in Philosophy and Literature Ph.D. Program at Purdue University. Goodhart received his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and was one of the earliest graduate fellows of the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine. With his English background, Goodhart specializes in dramatic literature, literary theory and criticism, and Jewish Studies. Good hart has published articles in Diacritics, Philosophy And Literature, and Modern Judaism, among many others. He is also a member of various editorial boards, including Contagion: Journal of Mimesis, Religion, and Culture and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Currently Goodhart is at work on two books: Moebian Nights: Literary Reading After Auschwitz and The Tears of Esau: Reading, Revelation, And The Prophetic.

This paper is based on our research on the former Habsburg Austrian city of Czernowitz – now Chernivtsi in the Ukraine – and the region formerly known as Transnistria, to which thousands of Czernowitz Jews were deported by fascist Romanians and their Nazi German allies during World War Two. It contrasts incipient and reluctant local efforts to memorialize this complicated and painful history with the memorial acts of Czernowitz survivors and their descendants scattered throughout the world. What has been erased and forgotten in contemporary Chernivtsi, takes ever-new form in the memories returning survivors bring back to place and, even more fully, in the lively afterlife this destroyed European Jewish culture displays on the World Wide Web. We argue that memory has become “connective” – generated by digital archives and practices and by the communities these foster on digital social networks. These communities elicit desires for renewed “return” engagements to place that, in turn, continue to energize additional digital listserv and website interactivity. Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Hirsch was born in Romania to parents who survived the Holocaust, and she received her BA/MA and PhD from Brown University. In 1998 Hirsch had the opportunity with Leo Spitzer to revisit Czernowitz, now Chernivitsi, Romania, to collect narratives and histories from her parents’ former home where they endured years of persecution. These as well as other intricately connected memories and remembrances of the Holocaust are collected in Ghosts of Home: the Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010), co-authored with Leo Spitzer.Hirsch is the former editor of PMLA and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, the National Humanities Center, and the Bellagio and Bogliasco Foundations. Her book, The Generation of Postmemory: Gender and Visuality After the Holocaust, is forthcoming in 2012. Leo Spitzer is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College. His numerous publications and essays, including Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (1999) and Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (1999), directly or indirectly deal with displacement, resistance, and with the role of personal and cultural memory. A significant contribution to this line of thought stems from his own childhood when his parents fled from war-torn Austria to Bolivia where he was born and raised in La Paz within a community of German-speaking refugees. Spitzer recalls the tenacity of this community who courageously adjusted their lives to reconfigure spaces where they might both remember the traditions of their past and leave room for new beginnings. From 1992-1993, Spitzer was a Lucius Littauer Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and he is the recipient of Guggenheim, Ford, and NEH awards and fellowships, among others. See https://asunews.asu.edu/node/21636 "Hotel Bolivia: A Latin-American life for Jews, ASU NEWS, 26 September, 2011"

If pain does not by itself account for the faculty of memory, it is clearly significant as an incentive and part of that faculty. Evidence for this is apparent in both public institutions (memorials, cemeteries, many monuments and museums) and private (individual) conduct and expression. Trauma (group or individual) is invariably associated with pain--there is no parallel after-effect of pleasure--and if trauma sometimes is repressed rather than expressed, also repression makes itself known in the present. In this sense, this ground of memory is also related to the origins of moral judgment, since recognition of the distance between present and past as that shapes memory is a condition of such judgment. This is not to claim that pain or its causes is 'good', but that phenomenologically, it is more than only an ASPECT of memory: it is at least in part constitutive of it. Berel Lang is Professor of Humanities at Trinity College, visiting Professor of Philosophy and Letters at Wesleyan University. Author of Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence (2009), Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics (2000), Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History (2005); Heidegger’s Silence (1996), Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (1990) and many other works bridging philosophy, aesthetics, ethics and history. Much honored for outstanding scholarship and teaching, he held fellowships from the N.E.H., ACLS, American Philosophical Association, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and is a member of the American Academy for Jewish Research. He has taught at Wesleyan, Trinity College, SUNY at Albany, the University of Colorado, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Professor Lang delivered at Wesleyan the annual 2010 Philip Hallie lecture, “Primo Levi, Writer (and Memoirist).”

Non-fiction narratives of trauma – in the form of journalism, family history, documentary and memoir – are now a feature of all the arts and many professions. Thousands of non-professional authors in the 21st century are also writing and, thanks to new technologies, self-publishing their narratives. Speaking from her own experience as well as an archive of letters and e-mails she has assembled from readers over 30 years, Epstein, a veteran journalist, biographer and memoirist, examines the motivations and rewards of writing traumatic narrative and compares the process to the healing effects of psychotherapy. Helen Epstein began her professional career as a reporter for the Jerusalem Post while she was a musicology major at Hebrew University. After journalism school at Columbia University, she became a freelance cultural journalist for the New York Times and the first tenured female professor of journalism at New York University. After the death of her mother, a survivor of the Holocaust, Epstein began an eight-year exploration into her Jewish ancestry, reconstructing an untold history from three generations of women. in 1979, her first book Children of the Holocaust quickly became a classic that was subsequently translated into French, German, Italian, Czech, Swedish and Japanese. "An enormous achievement," wrote the Chicago Tribune. "Heart-wrenching and unforgettable." Born in Prague and raised speaking Czech in the Czech emigre community of post-war New York City, Epstein was always fascinated by that culture. She wrote about it in her 2005 memoir, Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, a major contribution to both Jewish family history and the social history of Central European women. In her essay, “Coming to Memoir as a Journalist,” Epstein recounts her journey into this literary hybrid of journalism and memoir, reflecting that “unlike journalism, which demands that reporters ignore or subsume that subjective reality, memoir encourages writers to plumb it.” In her writing, Epstein enjoys working through the challenges of exploring the depths of subjective experience as it is informed by her journalistic, empirical research.

Children of Fire, Children of Water: Simon J. Ortiz & Gabriele M. Schwab read from their unpublished book. Moderator: Leslie Marmon Silko. Ortiz & Schwab's joint project is unpublished as a whole but for two sections in the following: “Imaginary Homeland Security: The Internalization of Terror,” pp. 79-95, America and the Misshaping of a New World Order, Eds. Giles Gunn and Carl Gutierrez-Jones, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2010; “Memory Is Key,” pp. 68-81, The Kenyon Review, Fall 2008, Vol. XXX, No. 4, Gambier, OH. Simon J. Ortiz and Gabriele M. Schwab, Children of Fire, Children of Water is a collaborative book project composed of dialogical memory pieces that reflect on memory, history and trauma in today’s global world. We are drawing on both personal memories and on the collective memories gathered from two different post-World War II cultures, Native American and German. Our memory pieces perform a cross-cultural exchange between Simon Ortiz, a Native American writer growing up on a reservation under the continuing forces of US colonization, and Gabriele M. Schwab, a writer of German origin who grew up in postwar Germany under French and US occupation and lives in the US. Reflecting upon historical violence and the ongoing traumatic effects of colonialism, war and genocide on individuals and communities, we are using a dialogical, experimental and evocative form. A form of cross-cultural boundary work, our memory pieces look at the traces left by the histories of colonialism and wars on our respective cultural imaginaries. Writing together, we position ourselves in a transitional space between our cultures and between history and the present. We use the stories we weave together as evocative objects that trigger memories we could not have recalled in the same way from within ourselves. In this process, individual memories transform themselves into a new synthetic memory born from cultural crossings. Our stories are not mere recordings of memories but rewritings of cultural memory in light of another culture. We hope that our audience becomes part of this process of rewriting memory during which histories are found and enacted in the present. The pieces in Children of Fire, Children of Water resemble mosaic compositions or kaleidoscopic images with fluid boundaries. They create a performance of cross-historical and cross-cultural encounters in two voices that, while discrete and distinct, continually interact with and color each other. The dynamic energy behind our project is created by resonances between our pieces and their power to work as catalysts for new memories that might never have emerged otherwise. Rewriting our stories in light of the other’s stories, we often play with bifocal storytelling and include bi- or multilingual interferences. But we also carry the traumatic silences and mute images of violent histories into our work, reflecting how the latter have marked us in different, yet often comparable if not resonant ways. The juxtaposition of life histories from different traditions, cultures and places may productively test habitual assumptions and patterns of thought as well as feeling states, if not structures of feeling. In the best case, such practices become part of unsettling engrained patterns of remembering violent histories.

Victims, survivors, and their descendants transmit the power of moral remainders. This intuition echoes in unison Václav Havel’s 1978 dissident statement from behind the former Iron Curtain and Herebert Marcuse’s appeal to Walter Benjamin’s postsecular faith that the dominance of one-dimensional thinking can be resisted: The moral power of the powerless resides in those without hope and power for whose sake hope is given to us. I wish to meditate on memory and hope as transgenerational moral remainders. Home Page at http://www.public.asu.edu/~mmatusti/index.htm In a book chapter on “Redemption in an Antiredemptory Age” (Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope, 2008), I examined two contrary types of museums, the Nazi project in 1942-45 to convert Prague Central Jewish Museum into a pan-European showpiece for the extermination of the Jewish race and Daniel Libeskind’s counter-monumental museums in Berlin and Copenhagen. The Nazi museum project endeavored to rewrite the past through celebrating the annihilating deed. A memorial dedicated to spiritual genocide would actively block hope across future generations. This intangible dimension of genocide is appropriately described by Saul Friedländer’s notion of “redemptive anti-Semitism.” This brand of racial hatred can be characterized as “redemptive” in the contrarian and theologically perverse sense evoked by designing a museum dedicated to an anti-resurrection (or inverse redemptive beliefs that would serve the annihilation of the future. In this presentation, I will consider two sets of counter-factual yet real life difficulties that illustrate, one, the dynamic of a conscience which forgives itself without shame and, two, the fabrication of historical evidence against future forgiveness. The first set of difficulties arises in “The Conscience Of Nhem En” (Okazaki 2008), the story of a photographer who at 16 recorded faces of prisoners who came through Tuol Sleng Prison during the reign of Khmer Rouge. The second set of difficulties steps out of the frame of the documentary montage, “A Film Unfinished” (2010), called by the Nazis “The Ghetto,” that the propagandist filmmakers shot and cut in 1942 as their testimony about Jewish life in Warsaw. The Nazi Ghetto film and the Prague Jewish museum project (1942-45) represent inverted uses of cultural studies and critical theory that are deployed to manipulate memory and the future. The desire to take the holy out of the holy while retaining shells of the holy mark the most overt strategies of spiritual or “redemptive” hatred. The complaint against critical theory that dominates some 1,500 pages of the recent Norwegian manifesto of Anders Breivik should be addressed to these abuses of memory and culture; indeed, that text’s collage of moral and pious verbiage is underwritten by the rhetoric of hate. In my conclusion, I will pose for a moment of silence at the postmemorials that blush whenever futures forget moral remainders. Un/forgiving memory and counter/redemptive hope practice mindfulness against human temptations to underwrite heavens and last judgments with a theodicy. The Conscience of Nhem En (2008) & A Film Unfinished (2010) will be shown in conjunction with Matuštík’s Monday seminar on Memory and this symposium presentation

Memory and history intersect in different ways to evoke the “killing reality” of the Holocaust. I examine efforts of the Germans murderers to minimize or deny their responsibility for that reality through evasive memory; the attempts of others, including some survivors, to reshape the narrative of destruction through celebratory memory into a story about the triumph of the human spirit; and finally investigations into the terrain of deep memory, where the clear borders between living and dying merge and we are faced with a condition of being I once called “deathlife” but now prefer to refer to as the “afterdeath” of the Holocaust. This approach, which I illustrate through examples from history and literature, strips from the catastrophe the burden of bravado or the consolations of the heroic gesture. It leaves us staring quite literally, as I shall show, into a realm that challenges memory to respond to the question of one of my authors: “When death has come, has one finished dying?” Lawrence L. Langer is Professor of English Emeritus at Simmons College in Boston and is the one of the leading scholars in Holocaust studies, working specifically in the fields of literature and testimony. His distinguished career began by studying the Holocaust as a literary scholar, but gradually his perspective shifted and he became fascinated by the intricate workings of memoirs and memory in relation to the event. Primarily he explored facets of the narrative of survival and strived to undermine Western misconceptions about the Holocaust in order to bring awareness back to an essential truth: The Holocaust was about atrocity and assault against the individual. Langer has worked diligently through oral narratives and video testimonies, seeking the voices of memory to bring them into the foreground. After more than three decades of teaching, Langer retired to pursue his writing. He has written extensively on the art of Samuel Bak and analyzes Bak’s work with a keen understanding of the historical, political, and religious context. Among numerous scholarly contributions, Langer has also received a National Book Critics Circle award and has been noted for a “best book of 1991” from The New York Times Book Review.

Emphasizing the need for a multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary, integrative framework for understanding massive trauma and its aftermath, this presentation examines victims/survivors’ experiences primarily from the psychological perspective. It briefly describes how victims are affected by mass atrocities, their reactions, concerns and needs. Delineating necessary elements in the recovery processes from the victims’ point of view, the presentation will focus in particular on those elements of healing that are related to justice processes and victims’ experiences of such processes. Reparative justice insists that every step throughout the justice experience -- from the first moment of encounter of the Court with a potential witness through the follow-up of witnesses after their return home to the aftermath of the completion of the case -- presents an opportunity for redress and healing, a risk of missing or neglecting the opportunity for healing victims and reintegrating them into their communities and societies, or, worse, causing (re)victimization and (re)traumatization. While restitution, rehabilitation or compensation may only come after the process has concluded, there are still opportunities along the way. Although not sufficient in itself, reparative justice is nonetheless an important, if not necessary, dynamic component among the healing processes. Missed opportunities and negative experiences will be examined as a means to better understand the critical junctures of the trial and victims’ role within the process that can, if conducted optimally, lead to opportunities for healing. Yael Danieli is a clinical psychologist in private practice; victimologist; Director of the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and their Children (which she co-founded in 1975 in the New York City area) and Founding Co-President of the International network of Holocaust and Genocide Survivors and their Friends. She has done extensive psychotherapeutic work with survivors and children of survivors on individual, family, group and community bases. Dr. Danieli has studied in depth post-war responses and attitudes toward them, and the impact these and the Holocaust had on their lives. She has lectured and published worldwide in numerous books and journals, translated into at least 17 languages on optimal care and training for this and other victim/survivor populations, and received several awards for her work, the most recent of which is the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). In 2008 she was appointed Advisor on Victims of Terrorism for the office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and helped organize the first Symposium on Supporting Victims of Terrorism at the UN. She was appointed Distinguished Professor of International Psychology at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, helping to build the first doctoral program in international psychology. She has served as consultant to the International Criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Court on issues related to victims and staff care, consultant to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Rwanda government on reparations for victims, and has led ongoing Projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Promoting a Dialogue: "Democracy Cannot Be Built with the Hands of Broken Souls") and in northern Ireland.

Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (Columbia UP, 2010) - an interview on Schwab’s work is conducted by Martin Beck Matuštík. The faculty group in Philosophy, Rhetoric and Literature and the Center for Critical Inquiry and Cultural Studies at the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences recently participated in a major interdisciplinary conference on Trauma Studies in October 2010. The Philosophy, Rhetoric and Literature faculty cluster held during spring 2011 a faculty seminar on Gabriele Schwab’s Haunting Legacies (2010). Martin Beck Matuštík teaches in Fall 2011 a graduate courseconnected to the symposium theme. The interview themes emerge out of the PRL faculty reading salon on Schwab’s work and the edited transcript of the conversation will be included in the volume of essays from the 2010 Trauma Studies conference (eds. Monica Casper and Eric Wertheimer).

Both Prado and Biehl choose the case of deeply traumatized women to show how the creative reworking and transformation of memory becomes a source of resilience. In Estamira's case such transformation takes place in the development of her own cosmological system and in Catarina's case (in Vita) it takes place through her poetry. In both cases the filmmaker or anthropologist become agents of memorialization through a complex dynamic of trauma and transference. Estamira(2004) was shown in conjunction with Gabriele M. Schwab’s symposium presentation on 4 November, 2011, 4-6:30 in KIVA at ASU-West campus.