Sebald/Handke

Reblogged from Vertigo:

In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he  succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.

Read more… 527 more words

Terry Pitts has written a wonderful post on Sebald's essay 'Across the Border: Peter Handke's Repetition', which is available as a download in English for the first time. I wrote an essay on this, ”Die irdische Erfüllung”: Peter Handke’s Poetic Landscapes and W. G. Sebald’s Metaphysics of History’, in: W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History, eds Anne Fuchs, Jonathan Long (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), pp. 179-197. (I've made it available on academia.edu.) Sebald's Bachelors has a section on homoeroticism in this essay, too... watch this space for more details...

Me and my grant

Mhairi McFarlane has written a fantastic parody of vapid celebrity interviews that may sound familiar to any of you who read women’s magazines:

So, I say, was it a difficult decision to choose to play Eva Braun, as she’s a controversial figure? She suddenly looks serious. “Obviously people have their views on what she did but really I just approached her as a character, as a story. You know, before anything else she was just a woman, in love with a man, trying to make a life for herself in Nazi Germany.” Did she do much research? “I avoided reading anything about her because I didn’t want my performance to be affected by other peoples’ opinions. You know, I wanted to get to the emotional truth. That’s your job, as an actor.”

I’d like to think that I’m slightly more concerned about the implications of representing the Nazi past than McFarlane’s fictional interviewee… but you can judge for yourself. Penny Sarchet interviewed me about my AHRC fellowship for Research Fortnightly, and you can read it here, though unfortunately only if you’re a subscriber to Research Fortnightly or you work for a university that subscribes. Some extracts:

Of the seven new fellows, two others also conduct research related to the Holocaust. Is this a coincidence, or is this a particularly strong field right now?

I think it is particularly strong and Britain has strength in it. [Other fellows] Stuart Taberner, from my own institution, and Jean Boase-Beier, from the University of East Anglia, are really world-leading scholars in the field. And I think there has also been a very strong development of memory studies, that’s been an academic trend over the past 10 years, so I think there is a cultural moment, certainly.

Do you have any advice for recent PhD graduates about pursuing a languages research career?

I think applying for research fellowships is the best way to go. I’ve been a teaching fellow myself, I haven’t had a research fellowship up until now, and that’s worked for me. But I do think it is really useful having a period of one or two years to really focus on your research, take that critical step away from your PhD research, get your book out, and start thinking about your next project.

How Holocaust survivors bear witness in German-language literature – Arts & Humanities Research Council

My generous funders, the AHRC, have featured my project on their webpage this month in honour of Holocaust Memorial Day.

How Holocaust survivors bear witness in German-language literature – Arts & Humanities Research Council.

The countryside is full of undeclared pathologies: Max Sebald’s Writing Tips

A wonderful treat for all Sebaldians: UEA creative writing students David Lambert & Robert McGill noted down Sebald’s tips on writing three days before he died.

Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

via Max Sebald's Writing Tips – Richard Skinner.

The Roman Road under the casino: the chimneys of Manchester

Last week, as I walked along the banks of the River Irwell, on a still dank January afternoon, the sound of a digger echoed across the water. I realised that the last industrial chimney in central Salford had just vanished from the skyline, with no fuss at all.

The most impressive thing, of course, said Ferber, were all the chimneys that towered above the plain and the flat maze of housing, as far as the eye could see. Almost every one of those chimneys, he said, has now been demolished or taken out of use. But at that time there were still thousands of them, side by side, belching out smoke by day and night.

I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialization had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see.

Should I feel post-industrial nostalgia at losing the last of inner-city Salford’s once ubiquitous chimneys? Coming from south county Dublin, which heavy industry never touched, I find it impossible to mourn for a time when soot, sulphur and lung disease reigned, and where the trees and wildflowers that are now vigorously colonising the riverbank were nowhere to be found.

She had lived among her bricks and mortar and smoke with the yearnings of a little Dryad underlying all her pleasures. In the Square real trees and flowers and thick green ferns and grass seemed joys so impossible. She walked about slowly. “Pretending” with all her power. She bent down and looked the weeds in their faces and touched them tenderly. They were such poor things, but in some places they grew quite thickly together and covered the ugly barrenness of the earth with a coarse, simple greenery which represented vaguely to her mind something which was quite beautiful.

[Frances Hodgson Burnett, The One I knew the best of all, ( New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1893), p. 256: describing Salford's Islington Square at the height of the industrial revolution, in her inimitably sentimental fashion.]

Yesterday, (on a guided tour rather than in a fit of solitary flaneurie), I descended into the vast vaults beneath Manchester, walking along a canal over a Roman road, under an eighteenth-century bridge, fourteen metres under the streets of Manchester. The Manchester and Salford Junction canal, following the track of Roman Camp Street, was thrown together in the late eighteenth century to compete with the Bridgewater canal, whose tolls were too expensive for Manchester’s rapacious merchants. Forty years later, the canal was rendered obsolete by the railway, and Manchester Central station cut off its path. A vast network of warehouses was built over the canal, and goods were hoisted up through chimney-like brick shafts from the underground waters to the trains above. Yet more ambitious lords of industry dug out the  Ship Canal to bring ocean-going liners into Manchester and cut out the duties being paid at Liverpool Port, and soon even the underground remains of the canal ceased to be used. Forty years later, the warehouse was decommissioned, central Manchester was bombed, and soon thereafter both the mighty Ship Canal and Grand Central station were also obsolescent and left to decay.

It was early the following year, if I remember correctly, that I ventured further out of the city, in a southwesterly direction, beyond St George and Ordsall, along the bank of the canal across which, from my window, I could see the Great Northern Railway Company depot. It was a bright radiant day, and the water, a gleaming black in its embankment of massive masonry  blocks, reflected the white clouds that scudded across the sky. It was so strangely silent that (as I now think I remember) I could hear sighs in the abandoned depots and warehouses…

Such furious labour, such vast structures erected in so small an amount of time, so many frail human bodies sucked in to haul canal boats and stack goods and build towering warehouses! As though a ferocious war had raged through Manchester for two centuries. It’s impossible, looking at the flashy casino and cinema now housed in the Great Northern depot, to imagine what it was like when the sky above was permanently black with soot and the mountains all about covered with cinders and dirt. I stood in a vast tunnel on the canal bed over the Roman Road, fourteen metres below the ground, and was told to look up: an eighteenth-century pack-horse bridge was still suspended over the concreted-over canal, and the groundwater is rising beneath it.

[Source: Nick Catford]

[All other quotes from W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. by Michael Hulse (London: Harvill, 1996).]

Guilty Pleasures of the Year 2012: a year in #fridayreads

It would be wonderful, of course, to write an elegant in-depth review of every book I read, but that is an aspiration reserved for the more serious book bloggers out there. Instead, I have compiled a short, ascerbic and in no way particularly reflected selection of my leisure reading this year below. Kafka, Adler and my colleagues’ monographs predominate in my non-leisure reading, but on the train, late at night and in the bath, here’s what I finished and, mostly, enjoyed, in 2012:

Book of the year, of the decade: Open City, by Teju Cole. So wonderful and Sebaldian and cerebral and beautiful that I need to wait a year and read it again and make it part of my life.

Other runners-up: Traveller of the Century, by Andres Neuman, lovely whimsical romance set in Biedermeier Mitteldeutschland, full of the sounds of Schubert and the plots of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the daffy ideas of German idealists.

South Riding, by Winifred Holtby, which is completely absorbing, combining Brontëesque passions with some good solid Marxism. Excellent stuff.

Tales from the Mall, by Ewan Morrison: half Fast Food Nation anti-capitalist rant, half flash fiction set in Scottish malls. Wildly entertaining.

Edward St. Aubyn’s Melrose novels, which I glugged down one by one in Germany, as thirsty as the aristocratic alcoholic protagonists. They left little trace, but were wonderfully biting.

The empty family, and A Guest at the Feast, by Colm Tóibín, who cannot write an untrue sentence.

Hope. A Tragedy, by Shalom Ausländer. Post-Holocaust, riotously impious novel. What would you do, dear reader, if you found an aged, filthy and spiteful Anne Frank in your attic?

Kraken, by China Miéville: squiddy fantasy fun from everyone’s favourite Socialist Worker

Pack Men, by Alan Bissett: aaaah, so brilliant! Masculinity tenderly filleted, with a side order of Manchester streetscape, Scottish culture and queer sex. Just: fab.

The Journey, Oh! What a beautiful Sunday and Literature or Life, by Jorge Semprún: amazingly sharp, moral literature by a Marxist philosopher who survived Buchenwald.

The Ministry of Special Cases, by Nathan Englander: conventional but gripping and moving novel about disappearances in the Argentinian dictatorship.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet: Binet manages to pull off both a meta-reflection on the ethical pitfalls of writing historical fiction, and an utterly gripping and moving account of the heros who assassinated Heydrich.

Inoffensive: Disgrace, by Coetzee: very well-done, yes, and I certainly learned a lot about white people in South Africa. I suspect the correct adjective is ‘fine’, or even more dispiriting, ‘Booker-prize-winning’.

Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson: she really is gloriously unhinged at times, but such madness is ideally suited to Pendle witch fiction.

Thursbitch, by Alan Garner: Perhaps it is the Manchester hinterland that sends writers gloriously mad. More dark magic lurks in the Cheshire hills.

Stasiland, by Anna Funder: not the GDR I know from friends who grew up in the former East, but quite gripping, still.

Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille: WELL GOSH.

Pleasured, by Philip Hensher: fun, well-done fall-of-the-Berlin-wall saga.

Gewalten, by Clemens Meyer: fantastic, foulmouthed prose fizzing with energy and intelligence.

There but for the, by Ali Smith. Wry, well-observed State of the Middle Classes epic in miniature.

Imperium, by Christian Kracht: rollicking adventures of a deluded German vegetarian in the South Seas before the outbreak of WW1. Enjoyable and not remotely racist, despite some odd fight on the matter in the media.

Entertaining Trash for those brainfree moments: Historical tosh by Karen Maitland, feminist chicklit by Mhairi McFarlane, scabrous Jude in Ireland by Julian Gough.

Not So Amazing: Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis: evidently initiated the manic, maximalist, magical voice–of-the-Nazi-perpetrator narrative that Jonathan Littell continued two decades later. I still think it’s a meretricious kind of achievement. Mass murderers are not interesting.

Zoo Time, by Howard Jacobson: I loved the rants about middlebrow fiction, but not so much the creaking misogyny. Sigh.

Childish Loves, by Benjamin Markovits: I really wanted to love this, but in the end just couldn’t. Byron is horrible, and effete New York writers with midlife crises just too dull.

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman: the premise of a self-conscious meta-magic-novel set in Narnia is brilliant, but why make the protagonist really miserable all the way through?

There were a lot of books that I ordered from the library and never read, including most of the Booker shortlist. Whoops. Perhaps I should call them up again. This was also the year I got a Kindle and, much to my surprise, I find I really dislike reading books on it, find it stressful and unsatisfying, and would far rather have the comforting heft of a paper book in my hand. It is wonderfully convenient for travelling, but I always look forward to picking up real books when I come home.

I always mean to read more history and sociology, but never do, and am sure I have missed some wonderful new gems. Readers, what have I left out?

Snowed Under with Strubel

On a wintry day in November 2009, I boarded a rattly train bound southwards over the Pennines in the dark hour before the dawn. Sleet turned to snow as the little train climbed higher into the mountains. I had a cold at the time, and the train was unheated; the white flurries whirled over the ruins of industrial mills and I shivered uncontrollably in my seat. The snowy journey was gloriously atmospheric, even if in my woe-stricken state I didn’t quite grasp its poetic potential, and it was wonderfully appropriate, for I was travelling to meet the author of Under Snow, Antje Rávic Strubel, at a symposium held in her honour in Nottingham. Despite the icy flurries, I arrived safely, was warmly greeted, and even managed to splutter out my admiration to the author, between coughing fits, when I met her in the corridor.

(from http://felixander.wordpress.com/2007/06/21/kaltere-schichten-der-luft/)

Perhaps not my most dignified hour, but I was so glad to be invited, as otherwise, I mightn’t have had a chance to read Strubel’s shrewd, sexy, cerebral novels. I had just begun developing my theories of queer resistance and lines of flight in Sebald, and was intrigued to learn about another author whose work circled around the same questions of German identity, queer resistance, the power of landscape and the tugging of the past. Though it’s unfair to class the fiercely independent and inventive Strubel as in any way derivative of Sebald, and her poetic project is very different to his. Strubel comes from East Germany and grew up in the final decade of the GDR, so the boundaries of her imagined Heimat are drawn in different places to those of Sebald; she is a far more self-consciously queer writer, and her work carries a feminist kick which is most welcome. Strubel’s novels are about women moving across continents and countries in pursuit of love, switching gender, fleeing the past; they are pared-down, acutely observed, at times dazzling with their brilliant literary conceits, at times soberingly harsh in their depictions of homophobic violence. Strubel writes about questions of gender identity and politics of the re-unified Germany while probing the ways in which the ghosts of the German past return to haunt the present.

The wintry theme in my journey with Strubel’s work continued; a year later, at Christmas of 2010, I wrote up the piece I had presented at Nottingham and sent it to Women in German Yearbook. A year later, I received full corrections, revised and, at New Year of 2012, resubmitted. The revision and editing process was extremely rigorous, and I learned a ferocious amount from the patient and wise editors in the process. This week, again in the depths of winter, my article has actually been published. Apart from being thrilled at getting the chance to write about a writer I admire so much, and delighted to have had an article accepted in a prestigious feminist journal, I have a geeky delight at having my very first jstor article published. Hooray!

But less about me, my coughs and colds and thrills; what did I actually write about? I focussed on three novels that centre around queer love affairs, one of which, Snowed Under is available in English translation, and two of which, Fremd gehen and Kältere Schichten der Luft, really should be. I tried to show how important Strubel is for debates about contemporary German literature and identity, by arguing that her portrayals of female-female relationships are not simply celebrations of lesbian love. Rather they are enigmatic affiliations between ghostly figures that tug at the boundaries of self and other, life and death, present and past.

Strubel’s versions of queer identity disrupt and reconstruct post-unification German nationality, so my article shows how repressed collective memories create and disrupt national and personal identity. I also draw out the key role of narrative in constructing genderqueer identities. These identities don’t only challenge traditional boundaries of gender and nation, destabilizing conventional German hierarchies of male and female, West and East German, but also disrupt boundaries of the unitary self. I conclude that, in Strubel’s novels, the subversive potential of this play with identities is undermined by the spectral return of the German past and by the realities of the present. Because of the dangers inherent in living out a queer identity in a homophobic and capitalist world, the protagonists of these three novels desire a nihilistic dissolution of the self rather than celebrating a liberated genderqueer identity.

So that’s what I had to say about Strubel, and of course I’d be thrilled if you read my article – but I’d be even more thrilled if you went and read her fantastic books. The richness and brilliance of her imagination is just a delight, and after all, the winter dusk is closing in…

(Article ref: Helen Finch, ‘Gender, Identity, and Memory in the Novels of Antje Rávic Strubel’, in Women in German Yearbook, Vol. 28, (2012), pp. 81-97)

Sebald was more interesting than the husband: Austerlitz and l’effet du réel

In wintry mid-December 2012, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a ninety-minute dramatisation of Austerlitz in its Drama on 3 series. Such a lovely surprise! Sebald has been dead over ten years, and I’m never sure the extent to which he is still alive for the general reading or listening public. So I was absolutely delighted that Michael Butt wrote the adaptation and BBC3 put it on; it shows that there are passionate Sebald lovers out there.

I’ll confess, I missed the original broadcast in favour of the pub, and only listened back the next day. I listened with half an ear, and then focussed back on my work. It was pleasant to hear words I knew so well dramatised, re-arranged, given voice and life, but I knew the words themselves very well, whereas the dramatisation, with its plethora of voices with inexplicable English accents, was something of a confusing Babel. It was well done, but it wasn’t my Austerlitz, the complex, slippery text I have lived with for a decade, with its images and vertiginous plunges into the fissures between meaning, its sonorous German sentences and Austrian intertexts. I was thrilled that it was produced so perfectly, and reached such a wide audience, but found little for me there. Terry Pitts of Vertigo felt that the adaptation entirely missed the point, and I can’t say I disagree with him:

Sebald’s book has been taken apart, abbreviated,  and remolded into a 90-minute radio play that at times is indistinguishable from a soap opera.  The narrator is positioned as writer looking for a new project before his eyesight gives out and when he meets Austerlitz he realizes he’s found his ideal subject. [...] This is a dramatization that belies Sebald’s original from start to finish by drowning out the text in a miasma of ambiance, never permitting Sebald to try to win over readers on his own terms.

Pitts argues that a more sensitive adaptation would have remained faithful to the voice of the narrator, refusing to ‘soap-operify’ the story with Agáta’s gasps and mawkish background music. But then, I am not sure. For one thing, the problems surrounding adaptations of literary works are a field of study in themselves – indeed, my colleague Catriona Firth has just published a book on this very issue. Adaptations are works of art in themselves, and the very idea of ‘originality’ and ‘derivation’ seem inappropriate for such densely intertextual works as Sebald’s. As an adaptation of Austerlitz, the drama was lacking for me; as a drama in itself, it drew in its listeners. 

And that is a unique feature of Sebald; his ability to draw people in, to make them feel recognised. In my viva voce exam, my external examiner asked me, ‘But why is it that people read Sebald and feel that he has captured some aspect of their lives they themselves couldn’t describe as well? I had a friend who grew up in Wales, and he says that Sebald wrote about that austere chapel-going childhood in a way that no-one before or since has managed to…’ There’s a tension at the heart of Sebald’s work here, one grounded in what he himself describes as l’effet du réel, the effect of the real. When he writes about his friend Jan Peter Tripp’s photorealistic works, he says that his breathtaking artistry is not simple simulation, because on the one hand it is artistry, and carefully modifies nature. And on the other, it contains the tiny flaws – the punctum, in Barthes’s words – that push both observer and painter over the boundaries of reality itself.

(c) Jan Peter Tripp, Ein leiser Sprung, from http://www.desitinpharma.com/?id=949.

Sebald’s work shares these characteristics also, and that is why, although Sebald never grew up in a cold manse in Wales, it manages to create a perfect illusion of that world. That is the wonder of his technique. So of course, no dramatisation can ever reproduce precisely Sebald’s artistry, and the moment a dramatist attempts to pull Austerlitz apart and extract a reality – a story - from Sebald’s complex textual artifice, the result is nothing like Sebald’s work, any more than an actor playing the subject of Tripp’s painting above could ever approach the effect of his painting, with its tell-tale crack in a non-existant sheet of glass.

But then, it also seems to me (to use the Sebaldian subjunctive with which I’m currently infected) that perhaps it is possible to be too engrossed by the minutiae of Sebald’s technique, and not also acknowledge the emotional effect of his narratives – their affect. Serendipitously, Barbara Graziosi wrote a diary piece on Sebald just this week in the London Review of Books. She has just been enraptured by The Emigrants, so much so that she starts to read reflections of her husband’s life history in its depths. Can it really be a coincidence?

I reverted to reading: Sebald was more interesting than the husband. Except that the two started, somehow, to echo each other. There were the place names: Lake Constance, Lindau, Ulm, the Bernese Oberland – the settings of childhood memories and Alpine excursions. There was the shock of encountering the British city: ‘I looked out in amazement at the rows of uniform houses.’ And there was a Jewish artist remembering his arrival in 1939: ‘My first night in England was sleepless not so much because of my distress as because of the way that one is pinned down … by bedding which has been tucked under the mattress all the way round.’ Johannes pulls out all the sheets and blankets when confronted with a tucked-in bed…

L’effet du réel, once more. Graziosi feels that The Emigrants says something emotionally and historically important about her life with her husband. Does it matter, in this context, that the ‘Jewish artist’ of The Emigrants, called ‘Max Aurach’ or ‘Max Ferber’, is partly based on a real painter, who felt hurt and betrayed at Sebald’s appropriation of his life story? Does it matter that the affecting scene where Agáta bids farewell to Austerlitz is lifted from Kafka’s diary, or that the moving, possibly melodramatic scene where Austerlitz sees a vision of her blue shoe in the theatre, fifty years after her death, is taken from Hofmannsthal’s Andreas, a novel about which Sebald was very ambivalent? Should we have to read Sebald with an erudite concordance to hand before we can begin to respond to him? If Michael Butt tried to present the emotional truth of Austerlitz, as he felt it, in his radio drama, who is to say that his classic BBC drama version, complete with slamming doors and tearjerking music, does not represent that important affective aspect of Sebald’s work which might otherwise be lost behind his complex irony and academic erudition? Or is it the case that if we allow ourselves to be bewitched by Sebald’s artistry into thinking that his work is just a reproduction of the real, nothing more and nothing less, we have consigned ourselves to the realm of kitsch that is the death of art? But after all, if we think back to Agáta’s twinkling shoe, it is not as though Sebald is himself innocent of his own moments of kitsch and melodrama.

Vertiginous questions, and even after writing a book on Sebald that focusses more on affect than technique, I am not sure whether or not this was a legitimate exercise. And precisely for that reason, soap-operatic techniques or not, I’ll range myself on the side of Michael Butt.

Speaking at the AGS: The Testimonial Turn? Remembrance and Representation in German Holocaust Literature between 1962 and 1977

As a nice Christmas present, I’ve had my abstract for the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland conference next year accepted for the History and Remembrance panel. I love going to the AGS – German studies is a small and geographically fragmented community in the UK, but it’s also extremely friendly and supportive. Many of the scholars I meet there every few years are not only leading researchers on the cutting edge of German, cultural and literary studies, but also old friends and mentors. There’s something really wonderful about our community, I feel; as anyone who is interested in modern languages in the UK will know, some in our research community have had a challenging time of it recently, as some departments have been forced to close and fewer students have been taking German at A-level. But the vibrancy of German studies research hasn’t been damaged, and neither has the spirit of camaraderie and solidarity shared at our annual gatherings in the AGS and WIGS. It’s fantastic to watch the intellectual development over years and decades of my community of scholars – and the socialising should be fun too.

It’s also really great – on a less elevated note – to have events to look forward to in the New Year! I’m at the stage in sabbatical that I dubbed ‘pyjamas and ballgown’ during my PhD; that stage of research where I rarely leave the house and start wearing pyjamas all day, and then dress up to the nines to compensate whenever a rare opportunity to meet my fellow-human beings arrives. So if you’re going to the AGS, and spot a researcher in a sequinned ball gown declaiming about Holocaust literature in spangly high heels, that’ll be me.

Here’s my abstract: I’d better book my archive trips so that I’ve done the research by then!

The Frankfurt trials and the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in the 1960s have been viewed as turning points in German memory of the Holocaust. While Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ created a new discourse of perpetrator guilt, Peter Weiss’s ‘Die Ermittlung’ created what many saw as a groundbreaking German aesthetic response to the Holocaust. This paper examines this so-called ‘testimonial turn’ (Wieviorka 2006) using a Bourdieusian model of the literary field to examine the extent to which the 1960s truly saw a turn to the voice of the victim in the developing German ‘Holocaust canon’. Using the works of Weiss, Adler and Hilsenrath as case studies, it argues that implicit aesthetic and ethical norms, imposed by gatekeepers from Adorno to publishers, still set limits on the form and content of German literary testimony to the Holocaust. The shifting status of ‘Die Ermittlung’, from celebrated cultural event to a text accused of erasing the specificity of Jewish victimhood, is set against the tepid reception accorded to Adler’s Holocaust testimonial novels ‘Eine Reise’ (1962) and ‘Panorama’ (1968), and the difficulty Hilsenrath had in finding a German publisher for  ’Der Nazi und der Friseur’ into the 1970s. The paper thus argues that the voice of the victim still struggled to find German publishers and audiences into the 1970s.

Delighted, honoured, and cheap: AHRC fellowship for ‘The politics of transmission of Holocaust testimony in the German cultural field’

I’m delighted and a little overwhelmed to be able to announce that I’ve been awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship for my next research project, ‘The politics of transmission of Holocaust testimony in the German cultural field’. There were only seven awards in the whole of the UK, and mine seems to have come in as the cheapest, which obviously makes me a bargain! On a more serious note, of the seven fellowships awarded, two of them went to German Studies at Leeds – mine and my colleague Professor Stuart Taberner‘s – and a third went to another inspiring and senior scholar in German and translation studies, Professor Jean Boase-Beier of UEA. An amazing vote of confidence for my department, and a fantastic statement of support for German studies nationally. It’s wonderful that the Arts and Humanities Research Council is promoting German and translation studies at a time when the modern languages community really needs support.

My project grew out of my work on H. G. Adler with Professor Frank Finlay. As I researched in Adler’s archive to discover why his literary testimonials to the Holocaust struggled to find publishers and readers, I started wondering whether he was alone in finding the path to publication difficult. In the difficult post-war years, was a canon of Holocaust literature in German established which implicitly excluded some writers, and why did it do so? Was there a particular difficulty about writing in German about the Holocaust that made it hard to have testimonials published and read? I formulated these working research questions, as I read further:

• How was a canon of German-language Holocaust testimony formed throughout the 1940s and 1950s?
• What impact has this hitherto unrecognised canon had on later German-language literature about the Holocaust?
• How and why have German-speaking literary witnesses to the Holocaust challenged this canon?

My study proposes that in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, an unacknowledged canon of Holocaust literature was formed in Germany. I’m aiming to create an innovative methodology, drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as well as on close literary analysis, to account for the mechanisms that ‘canonised’ some writers of German-language testimonial literature about the Holocaust and, more importantly, ‘excluded’ others. My project looks at a series of nine case studies, selected for their exemplary status as excluded writers from the canon of Holocaust literature over the course of the period 1945- 2012.

I suspect that my chosen writers were excluded for various reasons: because of being in exile and away from powerful networks of writers, because of writing in an unfashionable or controversial style (don’t be too funny!), because of their political opinions (a minefield in both parts of a divided Germany) and gender. These are working hypotheses, of course, and I’ll be finding out how the path to canonisation was formed as I dig deeper in the authors’ archives.

More formally, my project addresses the following research questions:

1. How was a canon of German-language Holocaust literature first formed in the 1950s, subsequently challenged in the 1960s and rediscovered and/or remediated in the decades that followed? What rules governed the process by which certain German-language authors had their Holocaust literature or literary testimony canonized, whereas other authors were excluded?

2. What influence has this canon had on later Holocaust literature in German, and how has it been remediated in other, German-or English-language literatures? How has this canon of German Holocaust testimony been remediated as a way to ‘read’ and ‘come to terms with’ other traumas in different, often transnational contexts?

My concrete plans for the fellowship include a monograph, an edited volume, and two conference papers. In addition, I hope to establish a network of scholars concerned with canon-formation in Holocaust literature and its remediation.

As part of the project, I’m co-establishing a Holocaust Memorial Day project based both in the University of Leeds and the wider Leeds community. I’ve also been involved in establishing links with the University of the Free State in South Africa, sharing insights into the role of literature and the literary canon in mediating testimony and trauma in post-Apartheid South Africa. In collaboration with Professor Taberner, I’ve established contact both with the Institute for Studies in Race, Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State, and with the Holocaust and Genocide Foundation in South Africa, and we’ve established an ongoing dialogue between UK and South African Holocaust researchers and  educators. I’ll post more about this aspect of the project shortly – it’s complex, exciting and very sensitive.

In addition, the University of Leeds has been generous enough to co-fund a PhD studentship that will be associated with the project. Watch this space for an advertisement!

I’m still overwhelmed and honoured at the award – and excited to start delving in the archives…