2 - Setting the Scene: Aesthetic Representations of Europe

Summary

IN THIS CHAPTER I will outline the theoretical framework I will use to investigate the capability of literature to reorder European memory from below. This will entail conceptual and methodological thoughts about the power of literature to transmit memories and will provide a contextualization of writings from both Eastern European migrant literature and German-Jewish literature. The comparison will reveal profound disagreements about the role of the Holocaust in present German and European cultural memory.

Adopting the Memories of “Others”

In contrast to top-down memory initiatives such as the New Narrative for Europe project, the authors investigated in this study create subjective narratives that invite readers to reflect on and perhaps adopt memories that they have not lived through and that have not affected their social environment. Opposing Kansteiner's conviction that cultural memory has to be “anchored in the lifeworld of individuals,” my approach is informed by a number of studies that investigate the ability of artistic media to initiate the reader to adopt the memories of “others” living in an entirely different lifeworld.

Most important in this context is Alison Landsberg's concept of prosthetic memory, which describes how modern technologies have made memories transportable and have increasingly detached them temporally and geographically from the person, or group of persons, who lived through the events. According to Landsberg, the mass media's transnational circulation of memories urges the spectator to identify with the memories of others and to inscribe these memories into their own life story as prosthetic memories. Prosthetic memories are thus not derived from a “lived social context,” but rather from a “person's mass-mediated experience of a traumatic event of the past.” Landsberg understands this process quite literally; she states that “a person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live.” This exchange of memory typically “emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experimental site such as a movie theatre or museum.” Taking a positive stance toward this mass medial dissemination of memories, Landsberg contends that the transportation of memory across large parts of the world “might serve as a ground for unexpected alliances across chasms of difference.”