Oct 29, 2016 | 2:40 PM - 4:10 PM | MAIN LOFT

Dr. Petra Rethmann, PhD

Ancillary Memory, or The Production of History in the Face of its Absence

Reading German author’s Uwe Johnson’s novels Mutmassungen über Jakob  and Jahrestage was a revelation. It made accessible to me the history and everyday life of 1950s Eastern Germany that was an important, if unacknowledged, part in my own upbringing and life. In my talk I am interested in looking at the ways in which literature and writing works to a) produce an emotionally explanatory story that would otherwise not have been available; 2) produce a form of memory that makes sense in the absence of more authoritative (and personal) stories, and 3) assists in making available and creating a past that may be necessary for the constitution of a “self.” In this talk I am especially interested in examining how Johnson’s writing helped me to understand better the isolation of a generation of 1950s East German refugees of whom my mother – as well as Johnson – was a part, and how and why their experiences could not become a part of the history of then-West Germany. In developing the term “ancillary memory,” I also seek to contribute to debates on memory by nuancing understandings of post-generational memory.

Dr. Ann Lazarsfeld-Jensen, Doctor of Philosophy

The fractured memories of Esther Polianowski

Throughout her life Esther Salaman was plagued by unexpected prescient memories that overwhelmed her current reality. Today her condition might be regarded as post traumatic, but the phenomena changed the course of her life and led to her study of the converging boundaries of memory and fiction in the lives of writers. The trauma of her life is clear in her fictionalised autobiographies. At 18 she was a rifle-carrying member of the Jewish resistance during anti-Semitic pogroms in the Ukraine before the First World War. Her neighbors and friends were murdered.  She escaped overland to Israel and then returned to rescue her family before going to Berlin to study under Einstein. When anti-Semitism intensified in Germany, Einstein urged her to go to the safety of the Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge. A stellar career in science seemed to be her destiny. However, her life was so overshadowed by her personal history that she found both escape and expression in fiction writing. Salaman's problems with memory were complex. In attempting to recall her student years with Einstein, she would only use information that she had recorded, refusing to trust impressions and recollections. These limits on her writing led to a style that was sometimes wooden. She lived in the midst of Cambridge intellectuals and a significant community of collaborators and supporters, but her early promise as a writer was short circuited by her own memory problems. Her struggle to retain her memories became epic towards the end of her life, when she could no longer recall or reconstruct truth in the last intellectual task of her life, a memoir that would have finally sorted her truth from fiction.

Biographies

Dr. Petra Rethmann

Petra Rethmann is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. She writes and teaches on the relationship between history, memory, and politic, as well as on aesthetics, art, political possibility, and imagination. She is currently working on a book that examines the relationship between history, memory, art, and "world-making." She is the author of numerous books, and of a number of articles that have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropologica, Cultural Critique, and Anthropologie et Society.

Dr. Ann Lazarsfeld-Jensen

Dr Ann Lazarsfeld-Jensen is an ethnographer who uses a Foucauldian genealogical method in archival research to explore religious and intellectual movements. She teaches the essential literacies - academic, information, ethical and evidence-based - at undergraduate level, and research methods to post graduates. Her recent publications include Lazarsfeld-Jensen, A. (2016)  Home and the female scholar: an ethnography of my own tribe. Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal. Lazarsfeld-Jensen (2016) in Soldatic, K., & Grech, S. Eds. (2016). Disability and colonialism: (dis)encounters and anxious intersectionalities. Routledge: London Invited chapter Lazarsfeld-Jensen, A.  (2015) Russian dolls: The Polianowski Sisters' Memoirs on Albert Einstein and Ludwig Wittgenstein Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal 11 (2) Lazarsfeld-Jensen (2014) Telling stories out of school:  Experiencing the paramedic oral traditions and role dissonance Nurse Education in Practice 14 734 -739 Lazarsfeld-Jensen, A. (2015) Lost generations, the hidden history of polygamous migration The European Legacy (In peer review) Lazarsfeld-Jensen, Ann (2014) A Foucauldian journey into the island of the deaf and blind. Social Identities: Journal of Race, Nation and Culture. Ahead of print online http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504630.2014.893816#tabModule Lazarsfeld-Jensen, Ann.  (2013) The English Warner brother triumphs over religious hegemony on the road to celebrity and dynasty. Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 17 (2) http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/AJVS/article/viewFile/2675/3653