Symposium: Material Memory and Place
ANU Centre for European Studies. 18 – 19 February 2011.
Friday 19:
I: Memory and Migration: German Australian Dialogues in the Humanities.
9.15 am
Welcome and Introductions: Jacquie Lo
9.30
Anja Schwarz (Potsdam), Entangled, Feral or Prosthetic: Tropes of Migration in Contemporary Memory Studies
10.00
Sue Andrews (ANU), Between Exile and Home: German Jewish Memories of Shanghai, 1939-1947.
10.30
Jacquie Lo (ANU), Dancing for the Dead
(Chair: Kate Mitchell)
11.00-11.30
11.30
Morning Tea
Nina Fischer (Konstanz), Between Dark Tourism and the Search for a Lost Home: Journeys to European Memory Places in
Australian Second Generation Holocaust Literature
12.00
Kate Mitchell (ANU), The Migratory Imagination: Anna Funder’s Stasiland as prosthetic memory
12.30
Julie Thorpe (UWS), Sites of Pilgrimage, Sites of Memory in Central Europe, 1900-1950
(Chair Sue Andrews)
1.00-2.00
Lunch
II. Material Memory and Place
2.00
Shanti Sumartojo (ANU), Re-imagining the nation in urban place: Trafalgar Square 1906 - 2010
2.30
Shanti Sumartojo (ANU) and Dr Ben Wellings (ANU), 'Held in the womb of our soil': the politics and diplomacy of
Australian commemorative sites in western Europe.
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3.30
Silvia Merganthal (Konstanz). Respondent
(Chair Jacquie Lo)
4.00
Presentation/Performance Zsuzsi Soboslay: “War Memory Hope”
6.00pm
Dinner at Vivaldi’s
Saturday 19 February
II. Material Memory and Place (Cont.)
9.30
Andrea Bandhauer (Sydney) and Maria Veber (Sydney), Sacrifice, Eradication and Preservation: Carl and Frieda Strehlow’s
work at the Hermannsburg Mission, Alice Springs (1895-1922).
10.00
Rosanne Kennedy (ANU), Mediating Perverse Archives: Indigenous Australian Arts of Return
(Chair: Sue Andrews)
10.30-11.00
Morning Tea
11.00
Roger Hillman (ANU), Lingering memory in European films
11.30
Mary Besemeres (ANU), Translingual Memories
12.00
Helen Ennis (ANU), Wolfgang Sievers: Photography, history and memory
(Chair: Julie Thorpe)
12.30 - lunch and return for wrap-up discussion – (chair: Jacquie Lo)
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Sue Andrews (ANU), Between Exile and Home: German Jewish Memories of
Shanghia,1939-1947.
From the late 1930s until after the end of the Second World War there were up to 20,000
stateless European Jews living in exile in Shanghai under Japanese occupation. Shanghai had its
own history as a city of refuge and was the port of last resort, an ‘in between’ place for Jews able
to make a last minute escape from Nazi Germany. In this article I examine the experiences of
German Jews living in Shanghai which open up seemingly fixed categories of national identity,
cultural belonging and citizenship. My project engages with and contributes to discourses on
diaspora, migration and German Jewish refugee memories of exile in Shanghai. As an Australianborn daughter of a German Jewish refugee, and from the temporal, spatial and familial distance
of the third generation, I undertake trans-generational memory work about the experiences of
my maternal grandparents who lived in exile in Shanghai from 1939 to 1947. I draw on family
photographs and letters written by my maternal grandparents to their middle daughter in
London when they were living in Shanghai, including in the Hongkou ghetto, and their search
for a new home/land at the end of the war. In this alien place and space the Jewish refugees had
limited knowledge about the fate of their families and communities fractured by war and
genocide. This small family archive represents a unique remnant of past lives, highlighting one
family’s story in the broader context of the milieu of exiled European Jews caught up at the
nexus of Chinese/Japanese/European colonial history and war.
Andrea Bandhauer (Sydney) and Maria Veber (Sydney), Sacrifice, Eradication and
Preservation: Carl and Frieda Strehlow’s work at the Hermannsburg Mission, Alice
Springs (1895-1922).
As part of a larger project concerning historical, cultural, and religious dimensions of German
migration to Australia, we discuss theoretical and practical aspects of what might be called the
Strehlows’ vocational migration. German Lutheran missionaries and their wives came to
Australia in order to carry their spiritual message to the people they regarded as "heathens.”
The fundamental tasks of the Lutheran missionary included learning the language of the
targeted Indigenous group, and producing a translation of the Bible into that language so that
the preacher could connect with the souls of the “simple people” in their own tongue. Jan
Assmann’s writing on religion and cultural memory invites the view that Lutheran missionary
practice in effect aimed to replace the “cult” or “primary religion” of the Indigenous group with
its own “secondary” or “book-based” religion. Because the “cult” religion of the Indigenous
group was articulated in rituals that embodied the cultural memory of the group, the
consequence of missionary activity would be the eradication of the entire culture.
Ironically, the very practices that Strehlow employed as a missionary, and then in his
ethnographic work, resulted in the textualisation and archiving, and therefore the preservation
of aspects of the Indigenous cultures he, with Frieda’s support, sought to change.
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Drawing on Assmann’s work on monotheism and the language of violence, our presentation of
aspects of the Strehlow’s time at the mission explores the conjoined narratives of sacrifice and
violence inherent in the Lutheran missionary project.
Mary Besemeres (ANU), Translingual Memories
As A.S. Byatt writes in the recent anthology Memory, ‘memory, language, and the body are
intertwined in a very complex way’ (2009: xiv). Contemporary neurological research such as
Damasio’s, on the one hand, and life narratives across many genres and media, on the other,
both attest to this complexity. My paper will reflect on how experiences of growing up in a
bilingual, cross-cultural family present a further complicating element in the nexus between
memory, language and the body, one often overlooked in discussions of memory and
embodiment alone.
Life writings by children of non-English-speaking immigrants to countries like Australia suggest
that language helps both to shape and, at times, to deform relationships within cross-cultural
families. Concepts specific to particular languages impinge on adults’ memories of their
relationships with family members, memories which help to constitute those relationships in an
ongoing way.
Intergenerational conflict is a frequent theme of immigrant narratives - ‘the age-old
generational conflict typical of much ethnic minority writing’ (Simoes da Silva 2004: 62). Yet the
role of language in such tension is less often considered. More than 200 languages other than
English are used in a variety of contexts by over two million Australians (Leitner 2004), and, as
linguist Michael Clyne noted, ‘people’s values systems, including those taken over from the
group of which they are part, play a substantial role in the way they use not only their first
language(s) but also subsequently acquired ones’ (1994: 1, emphasis added). This means that
relationships within immigrant families may be subject to tensions between what are,
effectively, different language ideologies. My paper explores how critically self-aware three
Australian life writers – Morris Lurie, Judah Waten, and Peter Skrzynecki - are of this process,
and the extent to which they incorporate it in construing their own, and their parents’, pasts.
Helen Ennis (ANU), Wolfgang Sievers: Photography, history and memory
This paper is concerned with a selection of photographs by German-born photographer,
Wolfgang Sievers, who settled in Australia in late 1938. The selection brings into dialogue
photographs taken in Berlin prior to his migration and those taken in Australian in the postwar
years (Sievers worked in Melbourne as an architectural and industrial photographer). Sievers'
position as a German-born Australian was subject to continuous negotiation, dependent on a
range of personal, historical, cultural and political circumstances. In particular I will address his
complex and ambiguous relationship to the past and to history - which only Germany
represented - and to the present as manifest in both Germany and Australia. In Berlin as a young
man he photographed the neoclassical architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, historic parks and
gardens and elements of an old Germany on the cusp of disappearing, as well as contemporary
scenes. In Australia as a newly arrived migrant he had no past to photograph and focused
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resolutely and exclusively on the present. I will argue that Sievers attempted to establish a
thread of continuity within his discontinous, ruptured experience by identifying the worker as
an emblematic subject. I will also consider his revisionist rewriting of his German photographs
through the addition of autobiographical texts which engaged in different ways with his
traumatic memories. Finally, I will evaluate his contribution in relation to that of his Australian
modernist contemporaries in light of historian Margaret Garlake's claim that exiled artists
brought with them progressive attitudes to 'the balance between tradition and modernity' that
were 'sufficiently distinctive to act as models for change'. (Garlake 2005)
Nina Fischer (Konstanz), Between Dark Tourism and the Search for a Lost Home:
Journeys to European Memory Places in Australian Second Generation Holocaust
Literature
Although the children of Holocaust survivors “lived on coastlines and played under open
horizons” in Australia, their parents’ European past remained a constant presence in their lives.1
The literature of the ‘Second Generation’ can be conceived as a narrative journey into the
parental past which was shaped by the loss of their family, home and culture during the
Holocaust. Placing themselves as far as possible from the European places of genocide,
Australian survivor parents generally embraced their new homeland and their experience as
immigrants is mostly positive; their children, however, experienced a double dislocation from
ancestral places in Europe - both in time and in space. Migrants tend to construct a memory
narrative of ‘home’, the former generational site, but in the case of the Holocaust family it is
what Peter Read calls a ‘lost place,’ (Read 1996) which has been destroyed culturally and
physically. Since the fall of communism, Jews from all over the world have taken to traveling to
Eastern and Central Europe to visit the sites of former Jewish life and culture as well as the
ghettos and concentration camps. While the term ‘dark tourism,’ has been introduced to
describe journeys to sites of tragedy, disaster, and death (Foley & Lennon 2000, Sharpley &
Stone 2009), for children of survivors, these belated journeys are not solely motivated by a
desire to visit Holocaust sites. Instead, they return to the parents’ former homelands and lost
places in the hopes of finding traces of ‘authentic’ memory in situ.
This paper investigates journeys to memory places depicted in Mark Baker’s The Fiftieth Gate
(1997), Lily Brett’s Too Many Men (1997) and Between Mexico and Poland (2002), and Arnold
Zable’s Jewels and Ashes (1991). The analysis is based on an understanding of place as a carrier
of collective and personal memory, as proposed by Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora and Aleida
Assmann. In this context, it analyzes how Second Generation migrants engage with place and
memory icons as receptacles of memory. As the texts show, the connections to the parental past
through spatial memory are mostly severed; the past is now present as a ruins, relic, or remnant
which requires imaginative investment. The journeys to European memory places will show the
impossibility of finding ‘authentic’ memory in lost homes, in fact, these family memory
pilgrimages also become a form of dark tourism.
1
Zable, Arnold: Jewels and Ashes. (NY, San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace+Co. 1991), p. 163.
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Roger Hillman (ANU), Lingering memory in European films
Two outstanding films of 2009 show that European memory continues to surface in unlikely
places. Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon explores communal life in rural Germany,
immediately before the outbreak of WWI, but positions its story to resonate with a viewer’s
prior knowledge of WWII. It offers a rare attempt in film to approach the psychopathology of
fascism’s national inroads.
Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere traces the rise of Mussolini from the perspective of the mother of his
first child, who is adamant that she was also his first wife. Where the luminous black and white
cinematography in Haneke’s film suggests a documentary quality, Bellocchio’s tour de force
keeps interrupting its own narrative with authentic documentary footage, largely of adoring
crowds rallied to hear Il Duce. Both films shed new, and very discomforting light on subjects
that clearly are not exhausted.
Rosanne Kennedy (ANU), Mediating Perverse Archives: Indigenous Australian Arts of
Return.
Developing a nuanced cultural memory of Indigenous child removal, compulsory assimilation,
and return—especially in a global context in which “genocide” conjures images of mass killing—
presents several challenges, both conceptual and archival. Anne Cvetkovich observes that
trauma that occurs in the private realm, such as sexual trauma, tends to slip out of visibility.
Child removal and institutionalization, which often included sexual and physical abuse, long
went unnoticed as trauma because these acts were carried out in private, and were normalized
as rescue and benevolence. Often, the only records of an individual’s removal and fate are those
preserved by government bureaucrats who perpetrated elimination. The challenge is to use
such records—what I call perverse archives—to create an Indigenous cultural memory of
dehumanization and survival.
Artists and writers, often motivated by their own family histories, have turned to state archives
to explore this history. Kim Scott’s novel, Benang: from the heart, and Judy Watson’s artist’s
books, A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood and Under the Act, incorporate documents and
language from Aboriginal Protection Board archives, bringing into visibility governance regimes
designed to destroy Indigenous identities, cultures, and genealogies. Produced in the wake of
Bringing Them Home, these works share features of roots narratives, but they are not primarily
auto/biographical accounts of a search for identity or a return home. Rather, they are powerful
aesthetic works that use Indigenous knowledges, languages, and materials imaginatively to
resignify, while also documenting, violent settler practices of dispersal and erasure. Scott and
Watson demonstrate that even perpetrator archives, however surprisingly, may function as
sites of attachment and affective investment, especially in an oral culture in which written
records are scarce. Their works reveal, in rich detail, the material processes through which
Indigenous people were estranged from Aboriginal family and culture, while performing,
through the creative process, subversive acts of witness, commemoration, and return.
Jacquie Lo (ANU), Dancing for the Dead
The making of memory has, in recent times, been controversial in this country, as evidenced by
the so-called „history wars" cantering on the representation of settler occupation of indigenous
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land. As Gay McCauley points out, „At stake, it seems...are not only questions concerning the
moral (and financial) responsibility of the present generation for the political and social
consequences of wrongs committed in the past but also a profound anxiety about the moral
legitimacy of the modern nation state." Within this context, memory-work, and especially the
making of monuments to commemorate the past, cannot be disengaged from larger issues about
the politics of reproach and culpability that tends to slide into discourses about victors and
vanquished, victimizers and victims. In this paper, I argue that such totalizing paradigms cannot
accommodate the tangled web of living history that the site-specific performance work, "In
Repose", seeks to invoke. Instead, the performance project might be more suitably considered
as a contra-memorial that challenges hegemonic forms of history and memory-work but which
is not necessarily in binary opposition to these forms.
Kate Mitchell (ANU), The Migratory Imagination: Anna Funder’s Stasiland as prosthetic
memory
Generically, Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2002) is positioned uneasily at the intersections of
multiple discourses. Often described in reviews as ‘creative nonfiction’ it combines elements of
history, journalism, travelogue and the historical novel. The book documents Funder’s quest to
understand life inside the former German Democratic Republic, incorporating eyewitness
testimonies of former East Germans, Stasi documents and other cultural artefacts into a
narrative that is as firmly about Funder’s process of discovery as it is about the GDR. While its
generic status is uncertain, it is clear from the opening pages that Funder conceptualises her
project as an attempt to document a past that ended abruptly in 1989; she situates her text as
an attempt to rescue this past from a culture that, she perceives, is eager to forget. As an
Australian writer revisiting German history, she thus positions her work as a repository of
cultural memory for a past that does not ‘belong’ to her. But how can one remember a past that
is not one’s own? In an increasingly globalised world, what possibilities and responsibilities do
we have to ‘remember’ the histories of other nations – particularly, perhaps, traumatic ones?
Seen from another perspective, can we presume to speak on another nation’s behalf, to imagine
another country’s traumatic history? And how might ‘creative nonfiction’ perform cultural
memory in this way?
This article examines Stasiland’s status as an act of memory, positioning it alongside historical
fiction as an engagement with the past that is ‘active, and situated in the present’ (Mieke Bal,
1998) in order to address these questions. It uses recent conceptualisations of memory, such as
Alison Landsberg’s ‘prosthetic memory’ (2004), and Daniel Levy and Natan Szneider’s
‘cosmopolitan memory’ (2002), to argue that, in the twenty-first century, memory functions in
new ways and through new vectors; it traverses national and ethnic boundaries and performs
multiple migrations, reflective of an increasingly globalised world. I argue that Funder’s
narrative voice, with which positions herself as an Australian outsider with an affinity for the
plight of East Germans, maps the postcolonial onto the post-communist, constructing a complex
relationship between German history and Australia’s own, and inviting Australians (the book’s
first, and intended, audience) to understand their own identity through the prism of German
experience.
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Anja Schwarz (Potsdam), Entangled, Feral or Prosthetic: Tropes of Migration in
Contemporary in Memory Studies
Our discourse on migration is shaped by metaphor. While migration movements themselves are
often described in terms of flows of water, prompting the talk of ‘waves of immigrants’ of their
‘influx’, or of ‘floods’ of people arriving, societies transformed by immigration have, in turn,
metaphoriaclly been likened to objects such as the ‘melting pot’, the ‘salad bowl’, the ‘mosaic’,
the ‘quilt’ and the ‘kaleidoscope’ among others. Conceptual metaphors such as these are
profoundly political and ideological (Ellis and Wright 1998) in that they provide tools for
understanding reality while simultaneously working to persuade us of a certain view of this
reality. As ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) they become entrenched in our
theoretical discourses; they impact on the formulation of our hypotheses about immigration
and shape our understanding of possible futures.
In contrast to the well-worn metaphors just cited, and which cognitive linguists and
practitioners of discourse analysis have gone some way to analyse and deconstruct, this essay
surveys a relatively small body of tropes employed both in academic and literary texts as part of
the attempt to describe the commemorative position of citizens with a migration background
vis-à-vis their host nation’s past. Among them are references to ‘feral’, ‘adjacent’, ‘triangular’,
‘latent’, enmeshed, ‘dialogic’, ‘entangled’, ‘touching’ and ‘intertwined’ memories. In contrast to
the previous examples, these metaphors of migrant memories are characterised, by their
relative ‘newness’ (with regards to both tenor and vehicle or focus and frame) and by their
poetic character. With the help of Paul Ricoeur, and in contrast to the overworked tropes that
characterise the often nationalist discourse on immigration, we might describe these metaphors
concerned with denoting the commemorative position of migrants in national memory
discourses as ‘living’ and as “regenerat[ing] meaning through the living power of
metaphoricity.” (Ricoeur 2004, 129).
Zsuzsi Soboslay (freelance performer, teacher, curator), War, Memory and Hope
This presentation addresses the following questions: How is memory carried in the body, songs
and sound? How does it restrict or condition presence? How is it retained into the blood of the
next generation? What song does it create in interaction with a new land?
Building on the idea of songline, which allows for the idea of a storied re-enactment of body and
voice along a path of movement through ancestral lands, the theatre project War Memory and
Hope works in a collaboration between musicians and theatre/movement practitioners to
reflect on the resilience of the human body, and the interplay between memory and renewal.
The project takes sound-landscapes [traditional melodies and tonalities] from Middle Europe
during and after WWII, and explores what it means to be an immigrant, or the next generation,
in Australia today. Whilst exploring ‘trauma theory’ and cultural practices, the work in
particular gives exercise to the interstitial zone where art gives expression to memory, loss,
continuity and hope in vibrant exchange between all these supposedly analysable modes of
experience.
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The presentation will include a brief introduction, but will focus on what happens in performing
through these themes. I intend to present a short, voiced movement-performance, reflecting the
development of the theatre project, but also in response to exchanges at the Symposium. The
whole process is about improvisation, so I intend to put myself on the line and see what occurs
in this context.
Shanti Sumartojo (ANU), Re-imagining the nation in urban place: Trafalgar Square 1906 2010
At the heart of London and one of the city’s most-visited tourist destinations, Trafalgar Square
has been a site of national significance since its construction in the 1840s. The Square’s built
elements emphasise a martial, masculine and imperial version of British history and national
identity; this narrative has also been reflected in its role as a site for spectators to gather for
official national events including royal coronations and weddings, end-of-war celebrations and
national sporting successes.
However, throughout most of its history, Trafalgar Square has also provided a site for
resistance to these official narratives. This paper explores the Square’s history, drawing out
examples where the use of the Square departed from these dominant narratives, providing new
ways of re-imagining British national identity. In doing so, this paper will discuss the Square’s
significance as a site where memory, history and national identity intersect and the implications
that this particular urban environment creates for contemporary narratives of British national
identity.
Shanti Sumartojo (ANU) and Ben Wellings (ANU), 'Held in the womb of our soil': the
politics and diplomacy of Australian commemorative sites in western Europe.
Why does the Anzac legend continue to resonate in contemporary Australia? A partial answer to
this lies in the official support provided to this particular national narrative and its utility in
linking contemporary Australia with other parts of the world. The links between
‘Australianness’ and foreign war sites has been explored at length in the cases of Gallipolli, the
Thai-Burma railway and the Kokoda track, but the recent discoveries of Australian and British
mass graves at Fromelles have shifted attention to western Europe as a renewed location for the
re-telling of the Anzac narrative. This paper – based on an ARC Linkage application – seeks to
explore how Australian national identity is constructed through the experience of place,
specifically commemorative sites relating to Australia's military engagements of the twentieth
century. It examines three commemorative sites in western Europe – Fromelles and VillersBretonneux in France and the Australian War Memorial in Hyde Park, London – and will
examine how multiple narratives and experiences of the spatial environment, commemoration
rituals, and the political discourse surrounding these places help shape contemporary
Australian nationalism and national identity.
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Julie Thorpe (UWS), Sites of Pilgrimage, Sites of Memory in Central Europe, 1900-50
This paper explores places of pilgrimage as lieux de mémoire for Central European Catholics.
Whether in Vienna, host city for the 1912 Eucharistic Congress and the 1933 ‘All-German’
Catholic Congress, or a Tyrolean village church containing the relics of a popular French saint,
sites of religious devotion allowed the faithful to participate in the construction of political and
cultural memories in Central Europe. At the same time, pilgrimage as an embodied form of
remembering allowed pilgrims to construct their own individual and social memories that were
not always part of the official political and cultural memory. Thus while the 1912 and 1933
pilgrimages primarily commemorated stories of empire, nation and the universal Church, they
also provided spaces for individuals to perform acts of personal devotion within the officially
inscribed spaces of public memory.
Another site of pilgrimage in Austria was the growing cult of the St Thérèse of Lisieux,
canonized in 1925. Thérèsian devotion in Tyrol, where the first shrine to the French saint was
erected in Austria, reveals the way that official memories promoted by the Church were often at
odds with personal acts of commemoration by Catholics. The growing numbers of petitions and
prayers to a French saint at a time when the Church was attempting to legitimize imperial and
national memories of Catholicism show how individual and social forms of remembering could
oppose and outweigh the efforts of authorities to construct a political and cultural memory of
Christendom.
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