“The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered – not from yesterday but from a long time ago.” W.G Sebald, interview in The Guardian December 20th, 2001.
I was very interested in Saul Friedlander’s concepts as described in Young’s article “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past,” especially the concept of collective and deep memory, deep memory being defined as “that which remains essentially inarticulable and unrepresentable, that which continues to exist as unresolved trauma just beyond the reach of meaning” (Young, 667). In order to adequately express an event that combines collective and deep memory Young argues that Friedlander’s hope is for a “uncanny history” that “makes event coherent, even as it gestures toward the incoherence at the heart of the victim’s memory” (668).
Reading Maus – this unconventional Holocaust narrative – made me think of other unconventional tellings of the events surrounding the Holocaust. The one that comes most vividly to mind for me is German author W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, a unique, meditative, and deeply moving (one of the more flooring books I have ever read) work that is less about a historical narrative of the Holocaust as an event, and more about the act of remembrance and the act of retelling. The story follows an unnamed narrator – a historian – who recounts his meetings with a man named Austerlitz, who tells the narrator the story of him discovering the story of his Jewish origins, and of his family; which includes him being sent as a young child by his parents to Wales before the war (you can look into the history of the Kindertransport here which sent over 10,000 children to the UK), and the discovery of his family’s death in concentration camps. Laud’s concept of witnessing is everywhere in this book. We hear of Austerlitz’s obsessive research into his family origins, and interviews with people his parents might have known, including his own nanny, all told by the unnamed narrator (who also speaks of his own act of transcribing what he has heard from Austerlitz). Here we are witness to the witness to the witness. At every step of re-discovering his history, Austerlitz is overwhelmed with deep memories that resurface, including remembering long-lost Czech phrases and visiulazing images of his mother’s face. It is interesting to think of deep memory this way, of something that was hidden so deep in trauma (the trauma not of the camp survivor but of complete displacement) that it has been completely forgotten it. For Austerlitz the act of witnessing (and retelling them to our narrator) the stories of his own life, and that of his relatives, allows him to discover himself on a profoundly personal psychological level.
Sebald also uses similar techniques than Spiegelman, specifically regarding the visualizing of “received history” (669). Sebald incorporates pictures in all his novels; in Austerlitz the narrator uses historical pictures and drawings to illustrate Austerlitz’s research, which highlights the “narrative hybridity” of the text (ibid).
Another way Sebald deals with trauma and deep memory, and what I personally find the most fascinating about his work, is his oblique way of talking about the Holocaust. Mark O’Connell provides excellent examples of this technique in this article. Sebald himself often spoke of his interest in using analogy to describe what he called un-describable events like the Holocaust, and what he terms “the traces of destruction [that reach] far back into the past” (I see similarities to Laub’s theory of trauma here). Throughout the book Austerlitz tells our narrator of episodes in his life that are profound analogies for the Holocaust – but which he is not even aware of himself since we as readers are the only one’s with the whole picture. This makes me wonder if this oblique analogical technique is an effective way of witnessing and dealing with deep memory.