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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013
Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013
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Between exile and home – letters from Shanghai, 1939–1947
More LessIn this article I discuss a personal archive of letters written by my maternal grandparents when they were living as refugees in the International Settlement in Shanghai during and after the Second World War. The letters are a unique, albeit fragmented family archive that represent their ‘epistolary selves’ through their particular accounts of exilic lives in Shanghai. Written to one of their three daughters, herself living in exile in London, they are a remnant of past German Jewish lives lived at the intersection of Chinese/Japanese/European colonial history, war and the Holocaust. From the temporal, spatial and familial distance of the third generation, I draw on a selection of the letters to illustrate the inter-connections of personal and public memory which, like migration itself, is a constant relationship of movement, of disconnection and reconnection between the past and the present. First I discuss how the letters provide a very particular account of how an upper middle class Berlin couple negotiated new lives in war torn Shanghai and their continued endeavours to maintain connections with a family fractured and dispersed across the world by persecution and war. In the second part I discuss how their embodied and material memories of home travelled with them from Berlin to Shanghai and in the process often became transformed, enabling them to establish a new, albeit transitory home, a place between exile and their further search for a new home/land
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Searching for a lost place: European returns in Jewish Australian Second Generation memoirs
By Nina FischerMigrants tend to construct memory narratives of their former homelands. In the case of Holocaust survivors, the locations of family and community in Europe have been destroyed culturally and physically and have become ‘lost places’. Lives of Holocaust survivors are rarely thought about from the perspective of migrant biographies, even though only very few survivors returned to live in their former hometowns after liberation, but instead moved to countries around the world. This article explores how memory of place as a vital part of the migrant-survivor family has a transgenerational effect. Growing up with narratives of the landscapes of pre-war Jewish European life created a double sense of dislocation from the former generational site in children of survivors: both in time and in space. Reading two Jewish Australian memoirs – Lily Brett’s Between Mexico and Poland (2003) and Arnold Zable’s Jewels and Ashes (1991) – this article investigates the ‘return’ journeys of both authors to Poland. I argue that the parents’ former homelands hold great significance in their children’s lives, that journeys to actual locations of family memory are an attempt to uncover memory in situ and to integrate the spaces of pre-Holocaust past into their Second Generation life narratives. Such journeys uncover that, while a home, a family or a community are not to be found anymore, the literal, physical places of the parents’ past still exist and evoke a certain familiarity, as a result of the memory narratives that suffused the post-Holocaust family
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Memory, migration and guilt
Authors: Aleida Assmann and Anja SchwarzFor a while now, German and Australian societies have been in the process of negotiating the understanding of their nations’ guilty pasts, constituted by the atrocities committed by Germans during the Third Reich on the one hand and the history of Indigenous dispossession in Australia on the other. These concerns mark a reorientation of national memory politics towards an empathic recognition of the nation’s victims. This article discusses the ways in which immigrants are implicated in these current renegotiations of ‘negative national memories’ in both countries
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Returning memory to earth: Towards Asian-Aboriginal reconciliation
Authors: Jacqueline Lo and Mayu KanamoriThe making of memory has been controversial in Australia, as evidenced by the recent so-called ‘history wars’ focusing on the representation of settler occupation of indigenous land. 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. This performative photo-essay asserts that such totalizing paradigms cannot accommodate the tangled web of living history that the site-specific performance work, ‘In Repose’, which deals with early Japanese presence in Townsville dating back to 1883, 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
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Remembering the Stasi: The Lives of Others as a foreign past
By Julie ThorpeThis article places the domestic and international reception of the German film, The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck, 2006), within a larger debate about popular and official memory and, in particular, what has been both applauded and derided as the film’s historical authenticity. I explore the notion of sacralizing history in order to ask what broader role of witnessing, observing and remembering the former East German state the film offers to viewers outside Germany. I argue that the act of remembering the Stasi and Germany’s ‘second dictatorship’ as a sacred site of memory is part of a wider postmodern project in screen memory and posttraumatic cinema
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The migratory imagination: Anna Funder’s Stasiland as prosthetic memory
More LessThe generic status of Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2002) is uncertain, but it is clear from the opening pages that the author conceptualizes her project as an act of memory: it is an attempt to document a past that ended abruptly in 1989 with the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic and which, she perceives, many are eager to forget. As an Australian writer revisiting German history, she thus attempts to recuperate a past that does not ‘belong’ to her. But how can one remember a past that is not one’s own? 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 example of Alison Landsberg’s notion of ‘prosthetic memory’ (2004), which fosters an affective connection to a mediated foreign past. I argue that in Stasiland, Funder deploys a range of literary strategies to make the past both comprehensible and memorable for her foreign readers, creating a community of memory across borders
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REVIEWS
Authors: Nicole Falkenhayner and Alessandra MarinoTHE LOST GERMAN EAST: FORCED MI GRA TION AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY, 1945–1970, ANDREW DEMSHUK (2012) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 324 pages, ISBN 978-1-107-02073-3, Hardback, € 79,00
LA QUARTA VIA: MOGADISCIO, ITALIA (ITA, ENGLISH SUBTITLES, KIMERAFILM 2012, 38’)
AULÒ: ROMA POSTCOLONIALE (ITA, ENGLISH SUBTITLES, KIMERAFILM 2012, 48’)
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On digital crossings in Europe
Authors: Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs
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