Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival

Camp Literature in a Transnational Perspective

Anja Tippner, Anna Artwińska

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110630985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The concept of "camp narratives" rather than "Holocaust narratives" or "Gulag narratives" is based on the assumption that literary accounts of camp experiences share common traits, aesthetically as well as thematically. The book presents readings of camp literature that underscore the similarities between texts about Soviet gulag camps, Nazi camps and about other camp experiences. While literature about Nazi concentration camps still serves as a point of reference for camp narratives in the same way that the Holocaust serves as a point of reference for other genocidal operations, socialist labor and penal camps have become transnational lieux de mémoire in their own right since 1989. This volume intends to provide a theoretical frame as well as an overview of several important European camp literatures and case studies of iconic camp narratives and to take a comparative and transnational perspective on the genre of the camp narrative.

II: Defining Camp Literatures: Overview

Eneken Laanes

Transcultural Memorial Forms in Post-Soviet Estonian Narratives of the Gulag

1 Trauma as a transcultural memorial form

When the documentary Memories Denied by Imbi Paju, an Estonian filmmaker, was first shown in Tallinn in 2005, it marked a new era in the remembering of Stalinist repressions and perhaps even the whole Soviet period in Estonia. The film caused a cultural shock and provoked strong emotional reactions, both from many prominent figures in the arts and culture sectors and from the general audience, almost as if it told the story of Soviet deportations and the Gulag for the first time.37 There was a feeling that despite nearly two decades of probing at the most painful experience associated with the Soviet regime, it was Paju who had finally managed to capture the profound effect it had on people’s lives. This chapter is inspired by the question of why the film’s approach was perceived as novel in Estonia after a long period of public attention to the memories of state terror.38

There are a number of reasons for the unprecedented impact of the film. Firstly, it is a very personal story of the director and her mother and aunt, twin sisters who were imprisoned in 1948, at the age of eighteen, for alleged collaboration with the Forest Brothers, the anti-Soviet military resistance movement that emerged after the Second World War, and were sent to the Gulag in the Arkhangelsk Oblast. The film is primarily about the profound effect that the untold story of the mother has had on the director, who in the course of the film tries to make sense of her experience by reconstructing the story with the help of survivor and expert testimonies and archival research, by situating it into a larger historical context of the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of Estonia. Secondly, the film is unique because it gives an account of Stalinist repressions from a gendered experience of women, focusing on sexual humiliation and violence under state terror. Thirdly, Paju makes use of the powerful visual medium of documentary film, only rarely utilized in narratives about personal experiences of the Gulag before. And finally, the film, produced in Finland and Estonia, seems to be consciously turned outwards, trying to tell the Estonian story to a wider international audience. All these features contributed to its success, both in Estonia and abroad.

By focusing on Memories Denied in this chapter, I am interested in what I see as a transnational turn in Estonian memories of the Gulag more generally. I will show how the Estonian culture of remembrance of Stalinist repressions was transformed in the past decade due to the transnational developments in the global culture of memory. The proliferation of memory discourses related to the Second World War in the early 1980s, augmented by various anniversaries of this major historical event of the twentieth century, by the early 1990s has led to the universalization of the Holocaust memory as the central aspect of the war. In the process, the Holocaust memory was developed into a global memory imperative for addressing human rights violations in the present (Levy and Sznaider 2006) and into a universal trope for multidirectional remembering of other histories of violence (Huyssen 2003: 14; Rothberg 2009). One of the most significant changes that the Holocaust memory and its universalization introduced into global memory culture was its focus on individual experiences of trauma and suffering, articulated in public by new cultural forms, such as survivor and witness testimony (Huyssen 2003: 8; Wieviorka 2006; Hirsch and Spitzer 2009).

In their landmark study, The Empire of Trauma, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman charted the ways in which in the past three decades trauma has emerged as the central moral category for making sense of our relationship to the past. They argue that the movement of individual suffering into the heart of historical understanding was not a result of scientific advancements in psychiatry, but that it came about through the shifts in moral values and sensibilities that arose in the context not only of the Holocaust memory but also of the women’s rights and Vietnam War veterans’ rights movements (Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 6). Whereas in the first half of the twentieth century the psychological trauma of injured workers or wounded and shell-shocked soldiers was attributed a negative moral value, starting from the 1960s the individual experience of suffering was re-evaluated as able to testify to the violent history of our age. Since then the legitimized individual victim has moved from a peripheral role into the center of the historical understanding of political conflicts and repressions.

Part of that change has also been the detachment of the concept of trauma from its clinical context and its move into everyday language, but also onto the collective level. On the collective level the metaphorical notion of trauma denotes large-scale violent events, be it political conflicts and repressions or natural catastrophes, that have left a wound on the collective memory. The double concept of trauma establishes a mutually reinforced link between the psyche and culture: “The collective event supplies the substance of trauma which will be articulated in individual experience; in return, individual suffering bears witness to the traumatic aspect of the collective drama” (Fassin and Rechtmann 2009: 18). The connection between the individual and the collective has made the historical trauma universalizable. As according to Fassin and Rechtmann individual experience of suffering is universal, so one’s personal experience of suffering allows one to empathize with and understand the violent histories of others.

Fassin and Rechtman’s social history of trauma as a universalizing moral category is interesting for me here because it maps a change of moral vocabularies. It reminds us that trauma has not always been the only language through which to make sense of political conflicts and injustices, something that is amply demonstrated by the Estonian memories of the Gulag.39 In the next section, I will explore how in the past decade Estonian memories of the Gulag have come to be dominated by the discourse of trauma, largely absent from the past memory culture. The first part of the chapter gives an overview of Estonian camp memories before Memories Denied: how they emerged, starting from the 1970s, in the émigré communities in the West and from the second half of the 1980s in Estonia, by using the discourse of injustice and survival, sometimes resistance. I will show that the first attempts to publicly remember deportation and the camps were local in nature and made use of cultural forms and the language of commemoration available at the time. Even if the transnationalization of the Holocaust memory and the emergence of trauma as a universal moral category, which is relevant for many legacies of suffering independent of their historical or geographical context, are dated around the same time that the Estonian memories of the Stalinist repressions first emerged, in the 1990s they remained largely untouched by the discourse of trauma.

If, from the perspective of trauma discourse, non-traumatic representations of the Gulag could be accounted for in terms of latency, Fassin and Rechtman’s account suggests to us that it may truly be a different way of interpreting the experience of suffering that is based on the sensibilities and values of the time and specific cultural context. Catherine Merridale, who has studied the social memory of Stalinist repressions in Russia, questions the usefulness of the trauma paradigm in this context: “The point is not to question the ubiquity of suffering and trauma in Soviet Russia, but to see that people regarded them differently” (Merridale 2010: 381). She maintains that even if suffering is universal, the responses to it may be culture specific.

It is only in the new millennium that trauma emerges in Estonian memory culture in reference to Stalinist repressions, imported, as I would like to argue, by memorial forms developed in the context of the Holocaust memory. I take the concept of memorial form from Ann Rigney, who noted that even though the past of different groups is always specific to those groups, the mnemonic technologies and memorial forms used to remember the past are often borrowed from other groups and recycled (Rigney 2005: 24). The transnational or transcultural memory studies have increasingly drawn attention to how narratives, images and mnemonic forms travel across cultures and are appropriated in order to articulate historical experiences that are politically and historically diverse (Erll 2011: 4). In this case, I am particularly interested in survivor testimony as a memorial form that personalizes and psychologizes historical experience and elicits an emotional response (Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 211).

In the second part of this chapter I will show how Memories Denied differs from previous ways of remembering the Gulag in that it uses the “postmemorial” form of testimony that tells a highly gendered story of personal experience of suffering by focusing on the familial trope. Starting from the film, the discourse of injustice and survival in remembering deportation and the Gulag has been gradually replaced by trauma. As I will argue, the change was partly the result of various transnational pressures on local memory culture that led to the need to explain local history to a wider world. In the remainder of the chapter I will chart the consequences of that change. I am particularly interested in the profound effect that these stories, consciously told for an international audience, have on local memory culture and what happens if memories that are deterritorialized by the use of a transnational idiom of trauma are reterritorialized and renationalized in the local context.

2 Memories of the Gulag before Memories Denied

Needless to say, the question of Soviet deportations of Estonians and the Gulag40 was one of the greatest taboos of Soviet Estonian public discourse and cultural representations throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The first texts about Stalinist repressions started to appear in Sweden in the 1970s, published by Estonian émigré commun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Camp Narratives in a Comparative Transnational Perspective
• I: Comparing Camp Narratives: Theoretical Approaches
• II: Defining Camp Literatures: Overview
• III: Witnessing and Remembering Camp Experiences: Comparative Case Studies
• About the Authors
• Index of Names
• Index of Topics