scholarly journals ‘Lightning flashes of my burning memory’

1970 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-66
Author(s):  
Claudia Benthien

Thomas Lehr’s novella Frühling (Spring, 2001) presents the last seconds of the fifty-year-old protagonist’s life – between the moment he shoots himself and the advent of his death. As an adolescent he realised he was the child of a perpetrator father who conducted human experiments on inmates as a Nazi concentration camp doctor. Written in an extreme variant of autonomous inner monologue, the novella interlaces perceptions and memories without transition. The textual structure dissects these incidents, as the syntax is often destroyed by punctuation marks and irregular orthography. At one point, the first-person narrator chooses the formula ‘lightning flashes of my burning memory’, which aptly describes Lehr’s poetic technique, reminiscent of traumatic flashback. This article argues that the protagonist undergoes residual experiences of dissociation as a result of his insurmountable entanglement in the guilt of the father. Thus, Frühling is a radical and disturbing literary treatment of trauma.

2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (sup1) ◽  
pp. 47-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Przemysław Charzyński ◽  
Maciej Markiewicz ◽  
Magdalena Majorek ◽  
Renata Bednarek

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chui-De Chiu ◽  
Hau Ching Ng ◽  
Wing Ki Kwok ◽  
Marieke S. Tollenaar

Feeling one’s own emotions empathically when negative thoughts about the self arise, a defining element of self-reassurance, promotes resilience to prolonged emotional reactivity. We propose that feeling empathically toward the self is accomplished by first stepping into the shoes of an objectified, undesired self-aspect, after which the process of perspective shifting should be completed by reengaging the self to experience the moment in the first person. We hypothesize that the resumption of the egocentric perspective in perspective shifting, a cognitive characteristic of sharing other people’s emotions, is crucial for self-reassurance as well. The relationships among flexibility in perspective shifting, self-reassurance, and emotion sharing were examined in community participants. Our results show that quickly switching back to a visuospatial egocentric perspective after adopting an opposing perspective relates to self-reassurance and emotion sharing. We conclude that both reassuring the self and empathizing with other people involve flexibility in perspective shifting.


HISTOREIN ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Turda

While recent scholarship has – for the past two decades – endeavoured to transcend initial reservations about memoirs of Holocaust survivors, the difficulty with some of these memoirs – namely their authors’ implicit complicity in unethical medical research and in the Nazi Holocaust in general – remains however problematic. To address this thorny issue, this article considers the memoirs of a Jewish inmate doctor, Miklós Nyiszli, who worked with and for SS medical officers in Auschwitz, and his Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. His memoirs can help us understand wider truths about the “bond of complicity” that, according to Primo Levi, existed between perpetrators and victims in the Nazi concentration camp.<br />


boundary 2 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-143
Author(s):  
Paula Rabinowitz

Daniel Blaufuks’s video Als Ob/As If formally interrogates the history of Holocaust imagery using a close visual examination of the 1944 “Staged Nazi Film” shot in Thereseinstadt. Layering his footage from present-day Terezín with a number of earlier films and television shows shot at or about the Nazi concentration camp, he contemplates the role of the image, both still and moving, in the creation of memory and history of the Holocaust. His video and phototextual book connect to literary explorations of the Czech concentration camp—by Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald, and Jiří Weil—as well as cinematic documentaries about the Nazi murder of European Jews by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Jean-Luc Godard. By focusing on contemporary Terezín, Blaufuks also brings to light aspects of memorialization within post-totalitarian societies investigated by filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Chantal Akerman, as well as by scholars of the Holocaust and post-Soviet Eastern Europe.


October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Martin Blumenthal-Barby

Michael Haneke's 2009 The White Ribbon is set in the village of “Eichwald.” Eichwald cannot be found on any German map. It is an imaginary place in the Protestant North of Eastern Germany in the early twentieth century. What is more, Haneke tells his black-and-white tale as the flashback narration of a voice-over narrator—a series of defamiliarizing techniques that lift the diegetic action out of its immediate sociohistorical context, stripping it of its temporal and topographical coordinates. Against this backdrop, is it possible to hear the name “Eichwald” without being reminded of, on the one hand, Adolf Eichmann, Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the key architects of the Holocaust, and, on the other, the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald? To be sure, Eichwald is not Buchenwald, and no 56,000 humans are being murdered here. Yet why this peculiar terminological fusion? What characterizes Eichwald, this model of a society in which adults have no names but merely function as representatives of a particular class and profession: the Baron, the Pastor, the Teacher, the Steward, the Midwife, etc.? What distinguishes this village that appears to be largely isolated from the outside world, this village that outsiders rarely enter and from which no one seems to be able to escape? What identifies this prison-like community with its oppressive atmosphere, its tiny rooms and low ceilings, its myriad alcoves, niches, windows, and hallways that evoke a general sense of “entrapment” and incarceration? This world in which even the camera appears to be shackled, to never zoom, hardly to pan or tilt, thus depriving the image of any dynamism, any mobility? Who—in this confining milieu—are the guards, who the detainees? And what characterizes the putatively illicit activities that appear to lie at its enigmatic center and around which the entire film seems to revolve?


2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Szanto

AbstractAccording to Giorgio Agamben, a “state of exception” is established by the sovereign's decision to suspend the law, and the archetypical state of exception is the Nazi concentration camp. At the same time, Agamben notes that boundaries have become blurred since then, such that even spaces like refugee camps can be thought of as states of exception because they are both inside and outside the law. This article draws on the notion of the state of exception in order to examine the Syrian refugee campcumshrine town of Sayyida Zaynab as well as to analyze questions of religious authority, ritual practice, and pious devotion to Sayyida Zaynab. Though Sayyida Zaynab and many of her Twelver Shiʿi devotees resemble Agamben's figure ofhomo sacer, who marked the origin of the state of exception, they also defy Agamben's theory that humans necessarily become animal-like, leading nothing more than “bare lives” (orzoē) in states of exception.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00022
Author(s):  
Fauzan Hanif

<p class="Abstract">Such cultural experiences have a possibility to be embedded in a memory of one generation. But there are mostly in form of traumatic experiences. And then, we learn that these memories could be transferred onto their children, or we could say it as “post generation”. In the novel <i>Dora Bruder</i>, such things happen when the author, Patrick Modiano, plays his attribute in composing genres to arrange and transfer his message. The story mainly concerns as the narrator try to find a missing girl named Dora Bruder. She was gone in 1941, or in the moment when Nazi was occupying France. This research aims to discover the relationship between the role of genre on emerging the message, particularly the traumatic ones by using the concept of genre and postmemory. From the analysis we conclude that Modiano use genres to transfer his message traumatic. It exists in form of the impression of absence. From the sensation of absence, he continues to transmit consecutively another impression of hollow, doubt, and also hope. For transferring his message and memory, Modiano mixes real documents and his fiction. He manifest them by constructing a story of another person and narrating it from the first-person point of view. He uses this technique to identify himself, because the “shared idea” of one’s could be related with another’s.</p>


Author(s):  
Daniel Arroyo Rodriguez

¿Es posible sobrevivir a la consciencia de la muerte? El presente ensayo aborda la imposibilidad de retornar a una forma de existencia ordinaria o inauténtica tras la experiencia del horror en un campo de concentración Nazi. Para ello, este estudio analiza el testimonio autobiográfico de Jorge Semprún La escritura o la vida, texto que, al margen de relatar la supervivencia física del testigo, constituye también un intento por superar la consciencia de la certeza de la finitud propia como posibilidad significativa. A través de la inversión del proceso de indagación en la existencia ontológica del Dasein que propone Martin Heidegger en Ser y Tiempo, Semprún trata de articular su consciencia como ser-para-la-muerte en base a parámetros ónticos. Esta aproximación responde a la intención del superviviente español de sumergirse en la existencia inauténtica como ser-en-el-mundo, desde la que pretende dar cuenta de su propia historicidad. Is it possible to survive one’s own consciousness of death? This essay analyzes the impossibility of returning to a form of ordinary existence after experiencing the horror of a Nazi concentration camp. In order to develop this idea, this study focuses on Jorge Semprún’s autobiographical testimony La escritura o la vida, a text that, apart from accounting for the witness’ physical survival, is also an attempt to overcome the survivor’s certainty of his own finitude as a meaningful possibility. By means of reverting Martin Heidegger’s philosophical theory, Semprún tries to articulate his ontological consciousness according to inauthentic paradigms. This approach responds to the Spanish survivor’s attempt to return to an ordinary form of existence from which he intends to account for his own historicity.


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