The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

By Susanne C. Knittel

The Historical Uncanny explores how certain memories become inscribed into the heritage of a country or region while others are suppressed or forgotten. In response to the erasure of historical memories that discomfit a public’s self-understanding, this book proposes the historical uncanny as that which resists reification precisely because it cannot be assimilated to dominant discourses of commemoration.

Focusing on the problems of representation and reception, the book explores memorials for two marginalized aspects of Holocaust: the Nazi euthanasia program directed against the mentally ill and disabled and the Fascist persecution of Slovenes, Croats, and Jews in and around Trieste. Reading these memorials together with literary and artistic texts, Knittel redefines “sites of memory” as assemblages of cultural artifacts and discourses that accumulate over time; they emerge as a physical and a cultural space that is continually redefined, rewritten, and re-presented.

In bringing perspectives from disability studies and postcolonialism to the question of memory, Knittel unsettles our understanding of the Holocaust and its place in the culture of contemporary Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Release date: Dec 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823262793

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The Historical Uncanny

Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

Susanne C. Knittel

Fordham University Press New York 2015

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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For Kári

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One

1. Remembering Euthanasia: Grafeneck as Heterotopia

2. Bridging the Silence, Part I: The Disabled Enabler

3. Bridging the Silence, Part II: The Vicarious Witness

Interlude

4. Lethal Trajectories: Perpetrators from Grafeneck to the Risiera

Part Two

5. Black Holes and Revelations: The Risiera, the Foibe, and the Making of an Italian Tragedy

6. A Severed Branch: The Memory of Fascism on Stage and Screen

7. Bridging the Silence, Part III: Trieste and the Language of Belonging

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This exploration of the historical uncanny began in 2006 when, as a graduate student at Columbia University, I revisited the memorial at Grafeneck in my native Baden-Württemberg. Growing up, I had been there many times before, but it was not until I moved to the United States and returned to visit my Heimat that I was struck by the inherent uncanniness of this place I call home. Little did I realize that this issue of the uncanny homeland—the unheimliche Heimat—would continue to preoccupy me for almost a decade. As I pursued this topic, the project grew from a seminar paper about a unique and obscure memorial in my own backyard, as it were, into a wide-ranging, comparative study, spanning two countries and encompassing the entire history of the Holocaust and its complex and contradictory memory in Germany and Italy. What began as a very personal meditation on postmemory and local history quickly developed into something much larger, often seemingly propelled by a logic of its own, leading me to clues and points of connection between what had initially seemed a rather idiosyncratic comparison between two asymmetrical sites of memory. The publication of this book marks the end (or at least a way point) of a long and fascinating journey, both geographic and intellectual, and I have been fortunate to have found many companions and guides, without whom this book would have been unimaginable and to whom I am deeply grateful.

I would like to thank Helen Tartar, Thomas Lay, Sheila U. Berg, Tim Roberts, and William Cerbone at Fordham for their help in preparing the manuscript. Special thanks also to Michael Rothberg and Sarah Clift for their generous and insightful feedback, which was immensely helpful and has greatly improved the book.

I am profoundly grateful to Marianne Hirsch for her confidence in and unfailing support of this project from the very beginning. It was for her seminar on contested memories that I wrote that first paper on Grafeneck, which was the spark for this book. She read many early drafts and gave excellent advice, not only in scholarly, but also in professional and personal matters. I would also like to thank Aleida Assmann, Andreas Huyssen, Elizabeth Leake, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Paolo Valesio for asking the right questions at the right time, for pointing out my own blind spots, and for reassuring me that I was on the right path. The constructive and delightful conversations I have had with Sarah Cole, Teodolinda Barolini, Luisa Passerini, and Günter Oesterle have given me courage and inspiration; their advice has found its way into my writing in many unexpected ways.

Along the way I have met many scholars in Germany and Italy who have been open to all my questions and whose advice has been invaluable. Franka Rößner and Thomas Stöckle at the Gedenkstätte Grafeneck have been irreplaceable allies and have become dear friends over the years. My conversations with Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz have forever changed the way I think about commemoration and memorialization. Their art is a constant inspiration for me. Francesco Fait at the Risiera di San Sabba memorial and Fabio Todero at the IRSML in Trieste have been very generous in granting me access to information and archival material. The writings of and discussions with Marta Verginella, Tristano Matta, and Sandi Volk helped me to reach a deeper understanding of the complex workings of memory politics in Trieste. I am grateful to Rossana Paliaga at Trieste’s Stalno Slovensko Gledališče for helping me unearth the typescript of Rižarna and to Melita Silic for her help in translating it. Thanks also to Bill Niven, Chloe Paver, Michael Schillmeier, Thomas Lutz, Brigitte Sion, Rainer Schulze, Monica Jansen, Chiara Bonfiglioli, and Andrea Hajek for their detailed comments and great insights on various chapters, articles, and essays.

Without the encouragement of many friends, their valuable feedback, and their constant reminders not to forget that there are other things in life, this would have been a very lonely process: Julia Faisst, whose courage, wit, and sense of humor have been a true inspiration to keep going; Brían Hanrahan, whose advice and astute commentary have guided me from the very first draft. Juliet Nusbaum, Saskia Ziolkowski, and Lillyrose Veneziano-Broccia provided much-needed moral and culinary support and were always ready with an encouraging word and a glass of red wine when I needed it most. Thanks to Jens Schmitz for many delicious Freiburg dinners and poetic, intellectual companionship. Thanks also to Barbara Gieh-mann and Barbara Stark for always keeping their eyes open and for sending me intellectual care packages. I am grateful to Ann Rigney and my colleagues at Utrecht University, especially Birgit Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele, and Judith Keilbach, for bringing me into the fold and making me feel at home.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, or rather, my three families, for always reminding me of what really matters. My American family, Nissa Simon and Melvin Woody, Andrea Gurwitt, Jonea Gurwitt, Rob Gurwitt with Karen, Sonya, and Sam, have given me the best home away from home that I could have possibly hoped for. My family-in-law, Ragnheiður Mósesdóttir, Matthew Driscoll, and Katrín Driscoll, and of course the late Harry, have welcomed me with open arms. All through this ongoing intellectual and emotional journey, my family in Germany have been my greatest source of strength. This book would not have been possible without the unwavering faith that my grandparents, Hildegard Jung and Ingeborg and Nicolae Stroescu, and my parents, Ulrike and Peter Knittel, have in me. I am eternally grateful for their generosity, their patience, and their love. My deepest gratitude goes to my husband, Kári Driscoll, without whose love and support this book would not have been what it is and I would not be who I am.

Utrecht, February 2014

A very early version of chapter 1 was published as Remembering Euthanasia: Grafeneck in the Past, Present, and Future in Memorialization in Germany since 1945, edited by Bill Niven and Chloe Paver (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 124–33. Versions of parts of chapters 2 and 3 appeared as Bridging the Silence: Towards a Literary Memory of Nazi Euthanasia in the Edinburgh German Yearbook 4, Disability in German Literature, Film, and Theater (2010): 83–103. Parts of chapters 1 and 3 have been published as Beyond Testimony: Nazi Euthanasia and the Field of Memory Studies in The Holocaust in History and Memory 5 (2012): 85–101, edited by Rainer Schulze. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as Borderline Memory Disorder: The Risiera di San Sabba and the Staging of Italian National Identity in Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, edited by Brigitte Sion (London: Seagull, 2014): 247-266. Parts of chapter 6 were published as "Memory Redux: The foibe on Italian Television," The Italianist 34.2 (2014).

A Note on Translations

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from texts written in languages other than English are my own.

Introduction

The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes

Papà, Giannina asked again, why is it that ancient tombs are not as sad as new ones? . . .

That’s obvious, he answered. People who have just died are closer to us, and so we are fonder of them. The Etruscans, after all, have been dead for a long time—again he was telling a fairy tale—so long it’s as if they had never lived, as if they had always been dead.

Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

On 19 February 2011, the New York Times reported that efforts were under way to update the memorial at the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau for the twenty-first century. The memorial, originally conceived in the 1950s by camp survivors, has always relied on the auratic force of the original structures and the personal belongings of the victims, which were presented with very little contextual information. With the passing of time, however, the site has become less self-explanatory, as successive generations of visitors grow further and further removed from the events commemorated there. As the article’s author observes, People increasingly see Auschwitz as ancient history (Kimmelman). The proposed update of the memorial is an attempt to ensure that the site retains its relevance for younger visitors, many of whose grandparents were born after the end of the war. Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, is quoted as saying that the exhibition at Auschwitz no longer fulfills its role, as it used to.

More or less eight to 10 million people go to such exhibitions around the world today, they cry, they ask why people didn’t react more at the time, why there were so few righteous, then they go home, see genocide on television and don’t move a finger. They don’t ask why they are not righteous themselves.

Cywiński hopes to address the visitors’ inability or unwillingness to relate their experience at the site to their everyday reality by introducing a more educational framework to the exhibition and the site as a whole. This overhaul comes in the wake of an unprecedented increase in the number of annual visitors over the past decade, from 450,000 in 2000 to 1.43 million in 2012 (Auschwitz Draws).

Paradoxical as it may seem, the large number of visitors may be seen as directly correlative to the disjuncture between their understanding of Auschwitz and the Holocaust on the one hand and their perception of current world events on the other. As Auschwitz moves from being a site of mourning and commemoration to a destination for mass tourism, the parameters for the visitors’ experience and conception of the place change. In some sense, Auschwitz is on the verge of becoming a tourist attraction like any other, albeit a very macabre one—an example of what is now known as dark tourism or thanatourism.¹ As such, visitors may not feel that the horrific events that transpired there almost seven decades ago have any bearing on their own lives in the present. In response to this shift, Cywiński aims to recalibrate the site and the exhibition to promote what he terms responsibility to the present, particularly among the large number of students and young people who visit every year. Since 2011, a few changes have been implemented, notably to the guided tour and to the national exhibitions, with the addition of a Russian exhibition and a special exhibition titled Shoah, curated by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, which opened in January and June 2013, respectively.

Cywiński’s concerns resonate with a trend identified by numerous historians and writers in recent years regarding younger generations’ relationship to the past throughout Europe and the Western world. In the introduction to his history of the twentieth century, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm remarks that most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in (Hobsbawm 3). As memories grow shorter, the sense of connectedness to a shared historical past, of a continuity between past and present—what Hobsbawm describes as an organic relation to the past—is being lost.

This grim diagnosis of the lost connection with the past echoes the French historian Pierre Nora’s assertion that the real environments of memory, the milieux de mémoire, no longer exist. Instead, there are artificial, constructed lieux de mémoire—sites, in the broadest possible definition of the word, where collective memory crystallizes (Nora 7). Nora conceives of group memory as a landscape or a web of material and immaterial sites that gain or lose meaning depending on the changing attitudes of a society to its past. Lieux de mémoire, by Nora’s definition, are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration (18). Furthermore, a lieu always consists of three different elements, the material, the symbolic, and the functional. Lieux are thus essentially hybrid entities, necessarily overdetermined, self-referential, and excessive. In addition to its tripartite structure, a lieu de mémoire is also, as Nora observes, double: a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations (24). What this means is that the lieu de mémoire exists in a constant state of transformation and resignification. In his monumental study, Nora collected 130 sites of memory (statues, monuments, emblems, graves, buildings, rituals, literary and other texts, songs, names, etc.) whose common characteristic is that they are charged with symbolic meaning, which is not fixed but rather changes over time and can even vanish entirely. In a world that still contained authentic milieux de mémoire, Nora’s project would be superfluous, as we would all presumably be embedded in our communal history. The less memory is experienced from the inside, writes Nora, the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs (13). The seven volumes that make up Nora’s Lieux de mémoire project constitute an archive of the disparate fragments of French national memory. Later critics have taken issue with the implicit Eurocentrism of Nora’s approach (cf. Winter 315), but more problematic with regard to the scope and applicability of his concept in other contexts is his reliance on the concept of the nation-state as a discrete and clearly defined unit. At no point does Nora’s project consider the place of ethnic or other minorities in this memory landscape: his is an entirely majoritarian model of national memory. As numerous scholars have observed, there are some striking omissions and unquestioned assumptions in Nora’s project; there is, for example, no entry on Napoleon Bonaparte, no mention of the Algerian War or French colonialism in general, and indeed Frenchness is limited to the hexagon of mainland France.²

In spite of these limitations and blind spots, Nora’s conception of cultural memory as a landscape or a web of material and immaterial sites that gain or lose meaning depending on the changing attitudes of a society to its past is extremely productive and has been developed by more recent scholarship, which has placed an even greater emphasis on the conception of memory as a network of interconnected nodes or knots. Thus, a recent special issue of Yale French Studies dedicated to memory in postwar Francophone culture proposed a transition from Nora’s conception of lieux de mémoire to the more multidirectional, rhizomatic nœuds de mémoire (knots of memory). Whereas Nora’s project was conceived as an archive and predicated on an entropic conception of French national memory, the conception of memory as knotted proceeds from the assumption that memory is not something that belongs to the past and is in need of preservation under archival conditions but rather an active process that exists in a continual state of renewal and change. As Michael Rothberg writes in the introduction to the issue, such a conception does not privilege any one definition or location, nor is it content to reduce any given knot of memory to its identity-forming function: Performances of memory may well have territorializing or identity-forming effects, but those effects will always be contingent and open to re-signification (Between Memory and Memory 7). That is to say, a site or knot of memory is not an organic, predetermined substance or object—as a site it does not have a fixed and unique location—but rather a node in a dynamic network of memory, the point of intersection of various performances and identity positions, none of which can be ultimately reduced to (or derived from) that particular site.

Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the principle of contingency and openness to resignification that defines the nœuds de mémoire was already a defining characteristic of Nora’s lieux de mémoire, which exhibit a capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications (Nora 19). The nœud is therefore not so much an alternative to the lieu as a reemphasis on a specific characteristic of Nora’s term.³ The problem with Nora lies not in his definition, which is very broad and malleable to the extent that it already contains the potential for multidirectionality that the nœuds place front and center, but rather that the expansive and inclusive potential announced in Nora’s introduction is not borne out in the actual collection of lieux that follows. Nora’s Lieux de mémoire were chosen on the basis of their fundamental importance for a specific configuration of Frenchness (the precise nature of which, moreover, went largely unexamined). But the significance of these sites cannot be unilaterally determined according to any one nationality, nor do their contours map seamlessly onto any single specific political or cultural entity. Indeed, the most significant lacuna in Nora’s project is the political nature of memory. His lieux are like seashells on the shore of the great sea of living memory (12)—a beautiful and poetic image, to be sure, but one that presents the creation or appearance of specific sites of memory as an entirely natural process driven by the ebb and flow of time rather than, as is often the case, one that is ultimately subject to political interests and motivations.

This politicization of memory is important not only at the local and national level but also and especially within the ongoing project of European integration. For at least the past decade, there have been significant efforts on the part of the European Union (EU) to foster a unified and unifying European memory, including the establishment of the House of European History in Brussels (due to open in 2014) and myriad projects and initiatives all geared toward discussing and codifying a pan-European historical and mnemonic framework.⁴ Thus, in addition to the national sites of memory projects modeled after Nora’s Lieux de mémoire (e.g., in Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy),⁵ there have in recent years been numerous articles and books published on the subject of European sites of memory, including Europäische Erinnerungsräume (2009) and the three-volume collection Europäische Erinnerungsorte, which was published in 2012; it is notable that these collections, like much of the scholarship on European memory, are in German.⁶ Especially in the context of the ongoing Euro-crisis, Germany has assumed an ever more prominent role as the de facto center of the European Union, and it is not surprising that these European memory projects have met with hostility and distrust from other EU member states, most notably Great Britain. Indeed, in any debate on the nature and purpose of European memory there is an important distinction to be made between centralized, monolithic, top-down memory projects mandated by Brussels in order to promote a united Europe and the diffuse, dynamic, and multiple European memories that are articulated in cultural artifacts such as novels or films, many of which of course receive funding from the EU.⁷

The project of European integration emerged in the wake of World War II as an attempt to prevent further devastating conflict. For this reason, the war and in particular the Holocaust have served as a touchstone for European memory to the extent that many view the Holocaust as Europe’s negative founding myth.⁸ While the Holocaust has indeed become a matter of universal concern as more and more European countries seek to come to terms with conflicting memories of World War II, the ultimate goal of a European sites of memory project must nevertheless not be to establish a consensus regarding the past, smoothing out discrepancies between the memory cultures of different European countries and thereby necessarily excluding certain memories. Even assuming that we accept that a European sites of memory project should ultimately be geared toward promoting a united Europe, it is extremely doubtful that it could succeed in doing so as long as there are still unresolved disputes about the significance of individual sites within their respective nations. Thus, any productive engagement with European sites of memory calls for careful attention to local and regional, as well as national, memory. In so doing, local memories can be contextualized and integrated into a transnational framework without losing their regional specificity. In this way, each site would be able to contribute its own history and memory to a multivoiced and multifaceted memory of the Holocaust.

The Historical Uncanny

The most significant and productive contribution made by Nora’s lieux de mémoire project to the study of memory is the expanded definition of site of memory beyond geographic locations to encompass cultural artifacts such as literary works, sporting events, music, and culinary traditions. This approach has been adopted by subsequent collections, notably Mario Isnenghi’s I luoghi della memoria (1997); Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (2005), edited by Etienne François and Hagen Schulze; and the aforementioned Europäische Erinne-rungsorte.⁹ Whereas the European memory project is by its very nature inclined to emphasize sites about which there is widespread agreement and which will serve to strengthen the integration of the diverse members of the European Union, it is important to note that the sites contained in these national collections are in many cases fiercely contested and in competition with each other. What we might take from this is that the nation-state as a more stable entity is better able to accommodate conflict and dissensus than the supranational federation, which is still required to justify its legitimacy and cohesion. Nevertheless it is an inherent characteristic of sites of memory and of memory culture in general that it is not only a source of coherence and community but also an object of contestation and disagreement. This is all the more important with regard to minority or countermemories that must constantly assert themselves in the face of suppression and marginalization at the hands of the dominant memory culture, particularly when the latter becomes politicized and instrumentalized in the interest of hegemony. It is above all this facet of memory culture that I am investigating in this study. One of the basic principles of the sites of memory project is that it can be continually updated and expanded to include new and different sites. At the same time, however, it must be able to move beyond its apparent aim of constructing a more complete picture of national identity, as if such concepts were not inherently problematic. Indeed, by focusing on particular sites of memory, we may instead succeed in troubling the preconceived ideas of what constitutes Italian, German, or European identity, which tend to occlude difficult or controversial aspects of the history of a particular group or region within or between nations.

Building on the methodology elaborated by Nora and his successors, I conceive of a site of memory as encompassing not only the specific geographic location of a historical event but also the assemblage of cultural artifacts and discourses that accumulate around a given event or memory over time. A site by this definition therefore denotes a physical and a cultural space that is continuously redefined and rewritten. Any given site of memory is thus composed of heterogeneous elements that mutually challenge and complement each other. In Deleuzian terms, each site is a rhizome comprising various nodes engaged in an ongoing process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The site may have an official component in the form of a memorial or a museum but also an unofficial or popular component in the form of a play, a novel, a film, or an art project, which gives an alternative or dissenting view on the same memory complex. Literature plays a particularly important role in this dynamic process as a singularly self-reflexive medium of memory that foregrounds questions of representation and representability.¹⁰ Furthermore, literature—specifically fiction, as well as what Linda Hutcheon has called historiographic metafiction—has the capacity to unearth forgotten and repressed aspects of the past and to defamiliarize history, make it other. Viewing a single site through the prism of an official monument or memorial as well as a literary representation affords a parallax view of that site, keeping open its inherent contradictions and discontinuities. A site of memory may thus be said to contain its own opposite, rendering it potentially uncanny with regard to the dominant or acknowledged historical record.

This inherent potential of sites of memory to trouble the self-conception and identity of individuals, groups, and nations is a key factor in what I am referring to as the historical uncanny. The term uncanny becomes especially relevant when we consider its German equivalent, unheimlich, as theorized by Sigmund Freud in his celebrated essay Das Unheimliche (1919). As Freud observes, the term unheimlich is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’]—the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar (195). Things are not so simple, however, since, as Freud goes on to demonstrate by means of a lengthy etymological investigation,

among its different shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. . . . In general we are reminded that the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. (199)

From this, Freud concludes that the semantic slippage between heimlich and unheimlich reveals something about the structure of the uncanny, namely, that it is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression (217). The word heimlich is in itself unheimlich precisely because it contains its own opposite. As elaborated by Freud, the concept of the uncanny applies first and foremost to the individual psyche. But the structure of the uncanny can equally apply to groups of people, specifically with regard to collective memory and group identity, and it is in this context that the notion of the historical uncanny assumes its significance.¹¹

The concept of the historical uncanny has been proposed in two recent publications, one dealing with Germany and the other with Italy. In the former, German Memory Contests, the editors, Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and George Grote, use the concept of the historical uncanny to describe the strange coincidence whereby historically interrelated events (8) happen to have occurred on the same date. As an example they name 9 November, which historically marks not only the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but also, before then, the proclamation of the first German Republic in 1918, the Hitler Putsch in 1923, and, most ominously, the Reichskristallnacht in 1938. As they emphasize, such dates become historically overdetermined, creating an uncanny repetition effect that exceeds a rational framework of analysis (8) and is therefore not typically acknowledged or examined by historians. Instead, they write, such uncanny coincidences are usually the proper domain of fiction (9). One might expand on this observation and posit that the uncanny effect is generated precisely because the coincidence seems symbolic and meaningful, representing an impossible confluence of reality and artifice, story and history. The second book, Das Unheimliche in der Geschichte, deals with the history and memory of the foibe killings in Italy and Slovenia, a highly controversial topic in contemporary Italy, which I address in the second half of this book. The editors, Luisa Accati and Renate Cogoy, use the uncanny in a much more strictly psychoanalytic sense to describe the symptoms of acts of historical repression. In this context, the foibe killings assume a paradigmatic status because inherent in the discourse surrounding them is the ethnic tension of this border region and the unacknowledged legacies of persecution and oppression carried out by both the Italian Fascists and the Slovene partisans. This emphasis on the mechanisms of repression and disavowal comes closer to my own understanding of the historical uncanny as a concept, which describes the vertiginous intrusion of the past into the present, the sudden awareness that what was familiar has become strange. This uncanny effect is at work on a variety of different levels, both individual and collective, national and transnational, in history and in literature—two components of a site of memory as I conceive of it. Moreover, an important aspect of the two sites I examine is the liminal position they occupy within not only public discourse but also academic scholarship. Because of their liminal status, the memory complexes at work in these two sites have the capacity to destabilize and deterritorialize received notions about the boundaries and foci of disciplines such as memory studies, literary studies, and historiography.

A site of memory may be said to be uncanny when it unexpectedly extends into the present, forcing a person or group to reevaluate their understanding of who they are and where they come from. In essence, the problems identified by Cywiński and his fellow curators of the memorial at Auschwitz have to do with the fact that for many people today, Auschwitz is quite simply no longer uncanny. It remains a monumental and disturbing symbol of inhuman suffering. But the shocking truth that it represents is by now more readily assimilable to an accepted historical past. The fact that visitors to Auschwitz can fail to make a connection to atrocities they see on television is a factor of their distance from the events commemorated there. Beyond that, the central position occupied by Auschwitz in the public consciousness (at least in Europe and North America) as a metonymy for the Holocaust as a whole, combined with its popular conception as a unique event, transcending history, has the potential to render the Holocaust what the historian Edward T. Linenthal calls a comfortable horrible memory, meaning that it allows people to reassure themselves that they are engaging profound events (qtd. in Rothberg, Multidirectional 9) while failing to engage with other events in the past or in the present that are closer to home and less easy to face or to reconcile with their sense of self. In the introduction to his pathbreaking book, Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg examines the implications of the Holocaust functioning as a screen memory in contemporary Western society. In Freudian psychoanalysis, a screen memory (Deckerinnerung) serves to cover up or displace an uncomfortable or traumatic memory by means of another, unrelated memory. Despite its apparent innocence, Rothberg writes, screen memory stands in or substitutes for a more disturbing or painful memory that it displaces from consciousness. . . . The mechanism of screen memory thus illustrates concretely how a kind of forgetting accompanies acts of remembrance, but this kind of forgetting is subject to recall (13). Rothberg uses Freud’s concept to illustrate how commemoration and collective memory may productively be described as multidirectional in their operation. Awareness of the inevitability of displacement and substitution in acts of remembrance, he writes, points toward the need both to acknowledge the conflicts that subtend memory and work toward a rearticulation of historical relatedness beyond paradigms of uniqueness (14).

Rothberg’s conception of collective memory as multidirectional has far-reaching and productive consequences for memory studies. At the same time, however, as the above quote suggests, multidirectional memory by Rothberg’s definition functions primarily between disparate memories and histories. In other words, the paradigms of uniqueness that he takes issue with are those that would disallow comparisons between the Holocaust and other acts of genocide. But what are the implications of such uniqueness paradigms for the constitution of the individual memories themselves? Rothberg argues convincingly for the need to conceive of memory as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative, and to examine the interaction between different historical memories (3), but we must also consider how these historical memories are not stable or clearly defined entities but rather subject to renegotiation in their own right. As I argue, it is crucial that we recognize not only how the Holocaust may serve as a screen for the memory of other genocides and traumatic histories but also how the established conception of the Holocaust itself as a monumental and self-contained event relieves people of the obligation to confront marginalized or repressed aspects of its history. By adopting an internally multidirectional approach to the memory of the Holocaust itself, this book thus participates in the broader project currently under way in Holocaust and memory studies of opening up the discourse to departicularized, transnational perspectives and other persecuted minorities.

Parallel Histories

The Historical Uncanny takes the memory of World War II and the Holocaust in Germany and Italy as a touchstone for exploring the cultural and political mechanisms by which certain memories become inscribed into the heritage of a country or region while others are erased or forgotten. The immediate inspiration for this book was a visit to the memorial Grafeneck in southern Germany, which commemorates the more than ten thousand mentally ill and disabled people murdered there during the Nazi euthanasia program in 1940. Despite the firmly established links between the euthanasia program and the final solution, these people are not commonly numbered among the victims of the Holocaust, and their memory does not form part of the commemorative discourse about this period. I began to think more carefully about what is left out of the discourse on the Holocaust, about the lacunae not only in public memory but also in scholarship on the topic, and the possible motivations—political, cultural, psychological, institutional—behind the promotion of some memories and the suppression of others.

The book is structured around two marginalized aspects of the memory of the Holocaust: the Nazi euthanasia program, which targeted the mentally and physically disabled, and the persecution of Slovenes and Croats in and around Trieste by the Italian Fascists and later the Nazi occupiers. I approach these marginal memories by means of a close site-specific analysis of two memorials, Grafeneck, which preceded the final solution, and the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, a Nazi-Fascist extermination camp whose victims were thousands of Yugoslav partisans, Jews, and Italian anti-Fascists. Historically, these two sites lie at either end of the Nazi project of racial purification, but their historical and cultural significance has been largely unacknowledged, in part because of the marginal position their victims occupy within the popular understanding of the Holocaust but also because the privileging of survivor testimony has led to the de facto marginalization of these victims within the discipline of Holocaust and memory studies. In the case of the victims of Nazi euthanasia in particular, there simply are no such testimonies, but this does not mean that representations of and responses to these events and their memory are absent from the cultural record. In order to access these memories, it is therefore necessary to look beyond a traditional definition of site to include fiction, biography, poetry, drama, film, and television as legitimate sources of cultural memory production.

The study is divided into two parts, one for each site, with a chapter linking the two historically and conceptually. Each of these two case studies is a substantial contribution to scholarship on Holocaust memory in its own right; by bringing them into relation with one another, however, I reveal the concrete historical links between them as well as the parallels and divergences between these countries’ memory cultures. It was the same group of men who organized, supervised, and carried out the killing of the mentally and physically disabled in Grafeneck and the deportation and killing of Jews and Italian and Yugoslav partisans at the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste. By determining what role these same perpetrators play in the conceptual framework of the two memorials, I am able to focus on the similarities rather than the differences between the two sites. The memory culture in each country is inextricably linked to the fear and avoidance of questions concerning the perpetrators, collaborators, and bystanders. What emerges from my analysis is a picture of commemoration as a society’s gradual attempts to come to terms with its own involvement in past atrocities.

Grafeneck and the Risiera have become sites of memory that increasingly contribute to shaping the regional but also the national memory of each country: as sites of exchange between the past and the present but also of collision between different versions of the past, they are at once historical, remembered, and constantly changing places. At the core of my analysis of these two sites is the conception that memory is a continuous process, or even a debate, and that literature, film, memorials, and museums participate in, shape, and provide the language for this process. Thus, this study is not only concerned with questions of representation and how selected authors or memorial artists address them, but also with questions of reception—how people interact with these sites and media and how their relationship to them changes over time. The guiding questions in this general context are, When and how does local and regional memory influence national and even international memory? What is the role of literature and memorials in this interplay between regional, national, and international discourses of commemoration? Further, how may we conceive of the relationship of the different media of memory to each other as multidirectional, and what are the implications for commemoration and our understanding of the past?

A comparative approach to Italian and German memory culture via two specific case studies contributes not only to the small but growing body of scholarship on Italian cultural memory but also to an understanding of the processes by which these two countries, with similar histories, have developed fundamentally different memory cultures. In the context of European memory comparisons are problematic but also indispensable. To compare does not mean to equate, homogenize, or trivialize, but rather to assess parallels and differences. To think comparatively is not to blend but rather to illuminate difference, to contextualize, and, with respect to memory, to create an awareness of the diversity of memories, to overcome polarities that prevent an understanding of the need to place memories in a broader historical or cultural perspective. Beyond their shared histories as Axis powers during World War II, there are a number of significant parallels between Germany and Italy that invite a comparative approach to their memory cultures. Both countries were late in their nation building and thus have retained strong regional identities. After the war both countries focused on reconstruction and experienced an economic miracle, with the result that a direct and in-depth working through of the years of Fascism and National Socialism (NS) was delayed. Both also had firsthand experience of the Cold War: while in Germany the dividing line passed through the entire country, in Italy it passed through the region of Trieste (the territorial decisions on Fiume and Trieste were only finalized in 1954). In the late 1960s and 1970s both countries struggled with generational conflicts and terrorism, but while the German 68’ers investigated the role of their parents’ generation during the Third Reich, the confrontation with Fascism in Italy remained focused on institutional or political issues and did not result in a direct personal engagement with the past.¹²

German reunification not only brought to the fore two different memories of World War II and of two totalitarian regimes that had