Autobiography and postmemory

Regine-Mihal Friedman

1. The autobiographical dimension in contemporary cinema

Contemporary cinema, particularly in the last two decades, has been characterized by a strong

autobiographical trend, a world-wide momentum expressed through various strategies involving the

use of new audiovisual media and the blurring of former categorical boundaries. This impulse has

not been restrained to the cinematic field alone but had suffused the domain of literature many

years before. Revived interest in autobiography may have been, according to some scholars, a

reaction to the prevalent structuralist and semiotic bent, with its insistence on the formal features of

the autonomous text and its exclusion of the subjective factor in the interplay between author and

reader. Thus, Tzvetan Todorov could then allude derogatorily to “the inexhaustible autobiographical

genre under which literature crumbles” [1] whereas - for other scholars, less involved in the semiotic

trend -,it was in “the huge diffuse nebula” of autobiography that the most interesting experiments

were tested, that changes might occur. [2] A series of neologisms- such as “fiction of the self”,

“autofiction” for Serge Doubrovsky, and “egology” for Derrida- were coined in the attempt to

circumscribe an elusive field whose vague confines vibrate between fact and fiction, document and

confession; in a realm where the conventions of both realism and modernism are invalidated. From

the eighties on, the autobiographical revival has called forth an unprecedented output of theoretical

research extending to new domains such as the women’s “prose of memory” and the life-writings of

minorities marginalized by their class, race and sexuality. Jacques Lecarme, a revered erudite in

the field of literary autobiography, wrote that “the genre has entered a process of enhancement:

from proscribed, it is now prescribed ”. [3]

In contradistinction with the emergence of this new hermeneutical realm however, film studies did

not elaborate their own critical discourse regarding the cinematic autobiography. The encounter with

the autobiographical component in film could be found in the writings of film-critics who emphasized

empirically some recurring images, motives and themes that authenticated authorship. First, Fellini,

Bergman, Truffaut, later Woody Allen, Nanni Moretti, and Spike Lee, were the most quoted

references. Thus Catherine Portuges, in her “Seeing Subjects: Women Directors and Cinematic

Autobiography” (1988) could aptly underscore the convergence of auteurism with the

autobiographical thrust. [4]

However, those same eminent scholars who had promoted the epistemological status of literary

autobiography came to argue against the feasibility of such an endeavor in the cinema. Hence, in

her seminal essay “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film” (1980) Elizabeth Bruss

enumerates the main features which bestow on autobiography its specificity, according to her own

definition of “this durable and flexible genre” as a speech-act. [5] She then proceeds to demonstrate

that in film the three parameters of canonical autobiography are upset. Thus, truth-value: the

congruence of the reported facts with other evidence; act-value: the personal accomplishment of

the retrospective narration; and ultimately identity-value: the oneness of author, narrator and

protagonist; are more or less subtly subverted when represented on the screen. Her conclusion

nevertheless corroborates the premises of her discussion, by prophesying the disappearance of

classical autobiography due to “the relative strength of alternative modes of expression” such as

film and video:

“To make the meanings of film human without falling back on an outworn humanism, to achieve

more fluid modes of collaboration and diversity rather than standardized expression, to establish

practices in which “I” may no longer exist in the same way but nonetheless cannot escape my own

participation- these concerns are not unique to film but among the most fundamental problems that

confront ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’ as a whole.”

Interestingly enough, as Bruss’ article was published, Philippe Lejeune, another major scholar in the

field, had postulated the identity of author/narrator/protagonist as the necessary condition for

establishing an “autobiographical pact” between the name- of -the- author and the reader.

Delineating an “autobiographical space”, he completed his threefold contract by a “referential pact”,

involving the difficult relation between the exteriors of reality and the interiority of the text -more or

less corresponding to the truth-value required by Bruss- and finally a “reading pact” that links the

work to its reception by an historically positioned addressee. [6]

In a chapter of her “Auto/biographical Discourses” which refers to Derrida’s writings and his

questioning of “The Law of Genre”, Laura Marcus explicitly alludes to Bruss’ and Lejeune’s

“taxonomic certainties” quoting Derrida’s conception of the genre-clause:

“The designation of genre gathers together the corpus and at the same time keeps it from closing,

from identifying itself with itself... Thus the genre-clause both engenders ‘genealogy’ and ‘genericity’

and puts them to death, is the condition of their possibility and their impossibility.” And Marcus

concludes: “He [Derrida] moves from an account of the law of the genre as a set of interdictions

which guard the purity of genres, to an assertion of its transgressive and disruptive force. It might be

useful to compare Derrida’s arguments with Benedetto Croce’s statement that “every true work of

art has violated an established genre”. [7]

Yet, Derrida’ s contention notwithstanding, and in spite of the exceptional proliferation of cinematic

autobiographies these last years, a recent study by Jacques Lecarme in the respected French film-

journal Positif (April 2000) still maintains that without nominal identity, there is no autobiography. [8]

Therefore for Lecarme, Truffaut’s “Antoine Doinel Cycle” cannot be considered as such; and

probably Ursula’s “Hungerjahre” (Hungerjahre in einem reichen Land, Jutta Brueckner, 1980 ) may

be of no account. For my purpose, I shall retain that Lecarme nevertheless opens some field of

reflection when he observes: “The use of video comes nearer to the diary, which requires

simultaneous narration, than to the autobiography, necessarily retrospective”. In return, I will adopt

the yielding new notion of autofiction, rejected by Lecarme, but thoroughly researched by Vincent

Colonna who defines it broadly as: “The fictionalization of lived experience” [9] .

2. Ohne mich as autofiction

The following considerations on the blurred boundaries between autobiography and autofiction in

film have been suggested by Joachim Paech’s inspiring article: “Zweimal ‘Deutschland im Herbst’:

1977 und 1992”. [10] The range of my essay will be limited however, and will focus essentially on

Dani Levy’s Ohne mich, his contribution to the second collective episode-film: Neues Deutschland

(1992). Paech has stressed the oddity of Levy’s participation to the project. Unlike the other four

young filmmakers involved, Levy is not a beginner, and despite his involvement in an empathetic

plea against right-wing violence in Germany, his origins are Swiss. I shall nevertheless try to link his

endeavor with a new sort of personal film that has recently appeared which seems on one hand to

border on a kind of witnessing and on the other hand, indulges more in the so-called “auto-fiction”

than in autobiography. I will furthermore consider Levy’s Meschugge (1998), his latest film to-day,

as a necessary corollary, a complement to his former Ohne mich.

Both films open with fire, and in both, German Neo-Nazis are the arsonists. According to Paech’s

previously mentioned article, the film within the film at the beginning of Ohne mich alludes to well-

known contemporary events in post-reunited Germany. It specifically deals with the racist assault

perpetrated during two days and nights in 1992 on a home for immigrant families in Rostock. Paech

suggests moreover that the German public as a whole, had become inured to the problems of

immigrants victimized by right-wing radicals whose slogans “Strangers Out” and “Germany to the

Germans” somehow echoed its own hidden agenda. For the German public, the sole disturbing

problem raised by this daily TV display of recurring violence against low income, defense-less, third-

world minorities, was “the bad image” it might give Germany abroad. Therefore according to Paech,

the young filmmakers’ empathetic commitment of 1992 could be compared to the precedent

endeavor of 1977.

Like Dani Levy who incarnates him,, Simon Rosenthal is in Ohne mich, a young Jewish film-director

living in Berlin. He is the committed film-maker who in the projection room anxiously awaits his

colleagues’ comments, and receives only embarrassed silence and bored remarks; the worn-out

topic has not even prevented Simon’s best friend from falling asleep. Simon ‘s girl-friend is openly

critical, as she first attacks her lover’s work for its total lack of originality and of artistic

sophistication. More cruelly still, she alludes to Rosenthal’s self-pitying involvement, his personal,

lachrymose identification with his topic. Unwillingly perhaps, she has thus outlined the almost

stereotyped icon of a young Jew, living in post-Holocaust Germany and traumatized by its Nazi

past. The portrait is completed by the young woman’s last recommendation before leaving her boy-

friend nearly devastated: “Try to be less clever and more courageous”

The young woman’s scathing remarks seem to be validated in some subsequent scenes where,

facing a threatening situation reeking of anti-Semitism, Simon manifests a pusillanimous attitude.

Reaching his floor at night, Simon hears virile voices clamoring together Nazi march-songs and opts

to creep home in the dark. Suddenly Simon’s new neighbor stands before him. Simon glances over

his ominous leather paraphernalia, tries to hide his revealing surname on the door and finally

shakes hands presenting himself with a German-sounding patronym. No longer Rosenthal, he is

now Krause.

Later, in the underground, a gang of young skin-heads divert themselves by terrorizing the

passengers and inevitably halt before Simon, which seems ready to comply with their humiliating

demands. The bulky passenger next to him forces Simon to sit down again, faces the hoodlums,

forcing them to flee. Before leaving, they remind Simon that in other times, his fate would have been

sealed in Auschwitz. The last pun of black, or Jewish humor, belongs to the victim, who whispers to

his tormentors: “But Auschwitz is a lie...”

Comparing Neues Deutschland with Deutschland in Herbst, Joachim Paech underlined the changes

that took place in the handling of the various media, as the young filmmakers involved in the second

project were able to express themselves alternately through the most diversified channels. In the

film itself, “reality” appears as already twice or thrice mediated. Thus, the sequence in the

underground opens with Simon recording his impressions on his mini-tape. He begins by indicating

the date: not surprisingly it is April 20th, Hitler’s birthday. Later, we view the end of the incident when

Simon sums it up on his computer and graphically lays it out like a sketch for a new film-script.

Simon Rosenthal’s Berlin is decaying, hostile, and menacing. At first sight, it appears that the young

man’s own grieving subjectivity colors his crumbling surroundings with apocalyptic visions of

violence and utter distress. While jogging in the streets to the rhythm of his astounding Walk-man,

he is confronted with beatings, rapes, and old people squatting near dustbins. During his run,he

succeeds to communicate physically the sense of his heart-beating and impending suffocation.

Unexpectedly, Simon’s personal “writing of disaster”, to paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, is

corroborated by further evidence. In what seems to be an answer to an intimate interview led by an

unseen interlocutor, Simon’s girl-friend agrees with his gloomy analysis of an alienating

environment that gets more and more xenophobic. She extrapolates beyond his avowed anguish by

admitting that she understands his fears and that leaving Germany may be the only solution. The

young woman’s afterthoughts converge with similar admonitions overheard during phone calls from

Simon’s mother, who appears to live overseas and who repeatedly urges her son to leave Germany

before it is too late. In this “Rashomonesque” inquiry on Simon’s traumatized personality, his mother

is viewed questioned by a female interviewer, perhaps his girl-friend who as in the preceding talk,

remains unseen and anonymous.

Although the story-line seems to follow a certain progression, beginning with the report on the

Rostock pogrom in the projection room dated April 3rd 1993, continued with Simon’s daily

encounters with racist outrage, particularly on April 20th, and sadly-comically ending with his final

call to his “mama” from his safest refuge: the moon, a permanent disorientation is at work as the

aural clues most often precede or cross the fast changing visual spaces. Together throughout its 20

minutes they grant this compact little oeuvre the gasping rhythm of a music-video encapsulating a

desperate report on the present state of things.

Simon’s breathless recurrent jogging is undercut by flashes where reminiscences, foreboding, and

visions mix and mingle. Thus, his first traumatic vision in the film, appears immediately after his

ominous encounter with his new neo-Nazi neighbor. Immersed in his bath, he is suddenly bullied by

a leather-clad Gestapo man bent over him and hurrying to follow him. The brutish silhouette

transforms into his smiling girl-friend nursing him affectionately as to make him forget her former

harshness. Their embraced bodies on the bed provide the foreground for the bright TV screen

reporting a NASA experiment. They part when Simon finally decides to answer his mother’s angry

soliloquy on the answering-machine. This second call, his piteous arguing ( “We are no longer in the

Third Reich”) work at various levels on the iterative mode - in Gerard Genette’s terms: narrating one

time what happened n times- or, in Ohne mich, what happened once may occur again. In the bed

the deserted young woman concentrates now on the TV show: astronauts are clumsily walking on

the moon...

On the phone, Simon’s mother had summoned his son to protect himself and fight back: his

compulsive jogging is apparently connected to his self-defense training as he mulls over the motto

inscribed as a perpetual remainder above his computer: “Who is afraid has already lost”. To

complete his body-building, Simon joins a karate practice session. But for the female instructor who

refuses to coach him, potential victims can only be women, children, not a young white man. One

by one, the children, obviously non-German, face the camera and reassure him smilingly: “I will not

die”. When leaving, he meets in the entrance two little girls, playing with a ball. One faces him with a

yellow star on her chest. Outside, SA men are roaming. He stops out-of-breath under a porch; a

black-clad SS stands close to him...

3. From analytical cure to post-memory

In his “De l’Acte Autobiographique” Jean-Francois Chiantaretto stresses that both autobiographical

expression and the analytical cure are tightly intertwined as both reconstruct through narration the

flow of life. In both cases the shaping of the self is closely linked to the process and outcome of the

narrative act. [11] In her already mentioned article, Catherine Portuges details the psychological

motives traditionally associated with the autobiographical drive: “A desire to set the record straight,

the wish to restore a creativity presumed lost or attenuated, the need to tell one’s family story, the

longing for reconciliation with persons loved or feared from the past”. Yet, she observes that the

cinematic autobiography may be a reverted psychoanalytical process: where the analysand, by free

association, rewords visual and sensory material into language, the challenge of the film-maker is to

translate screen-memories into visual text, to recover primary images, “motivated by the desire to

reincarnate past experiences, or to reanimate an immortal object”. [12] Incontestably, these

elements are at work in Levy’s film which suggests a kind of reading informed by psychoanalysis

and for which the auteur perhaps too willingly provides the cues.

Thus in the conspicuous absence of any father figure, the bond and bind between mother and son

in Ohne mich inevitably brings to mind Woody Allen’s or Philip Roth’s emotionally impaired,

immature Jewish males, who are unable to confront their demanding and domineering mothers.

Here however, the expected Freudian explanation of a wounded narcissism or an unfulfilled object -

relation, fails to do justice to this dense and tense little oeuvre. Ohne mich illustrates exemplarily not

only the ontogenetic trauma of the individual human being, but the specifically Jewish historical

trauma and more strictly speaking the trauma of the generations of the Aftermath. In Marianne

Hirsch’ s terms: “The response of the second generation to the trauma of the first.” [13]

Ohne mich is but one example of the effervescent artistic creativity expressing these last years the

new generations’ awareness of their inescapable legacy. In his influential article “Trauma, Memory,

and Transference”, Saul Friedlander writes:

“There is a growing sensitivity to literature and art. The voices of the second generation are as

powerful as the best work produced by contemporaries of the Nazi epoch.” [14]

For these vicarious or surrogate witnesses: “the generation that bears the scar without the wound”,

[15] the main issue at stake is the kind of memory they may summon up in comparison and

juxtaposition with their parents’ traumatic reminiscences, a question raised powerfully in Levy’s

work.

In his “Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of Memory“ Lawrence Langer has established an

extended typology based on survivors’ evidence collected mainly by the Fortunoff Video Archives at

Yale. His study expanded chiefly on the kind of fluctuation between common and deep memory, a

most powerful distinction proposed by the French survivor and writer Charlotte Delbo. [16] In his

above-mentioned article, Saul Friedlander in his turn expounded on Delbo and Langer’s

distinctions, stressing that: “common memory tends to restore coherence, closure and possibly a

redemptive stance whereas the attempt at building a coherent self founders on the intractable return

of the repressed and recurring deep memory.... Deep memory and common memory are ultimately

irreducible to each other.” [17]

The present scholarly preoccupation with trauma, however, together with a closer consideration for

the accomplishments of the new generations, point to an unavoidable inheritance of grief together

with a pervasive sense of guilt. For these later generations who cannot build on direct witnessing or

rely on personal remembrance, distinct notions have been necessary.One such concept is

Marianne Hirsch’s “post-memory”, which has been intensely reworked since she defined it as:

“A powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not

through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation...post-memory

characterizes the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their

birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generations, shaped

by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor recreated.” [18]

In an earlier article, Hirsch seemed anxious to sharpen the distinction between history and the

levels of both memory and post-memory:

“Post-memory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep

personal connection. Post-memory should reflect back on memory, revealing it as equally

constructed, equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination”. [19]

This new-found category feeds necessarily todays on the so-called mass cultural technologies of

memory which enable individuals to experience, as if they were their own, events they did not live

through and which provide vivid experiences of the past that can shape and inform subjectivity.

Thus Alison Landsberg has conceived the term of “prosthetic memory” to describe “memories that

circulate publicly, that are not organically based but are nonetheless experienced with one’s own

body... like an artificial limb, they are actually worn by the body.” [20]

Thoroughly aware of this never-ending recontextulization of images, Hirsch has once more

reformulated post-memory “from the vantage point of a historical and generational moment fully

cognizant of the mediated and media-driven scene of representation that shapes both knowledge

and memory”. Her most recent version to- day places superbly this notion in a broader “space of

remembrance” which to encompasses Dani Levy’s manifold ethical endeavor:

“It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences -and thus also the memories -of others, as

experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story. It is a

question, more specifically, of an ethical relation to the oppressed or persecuted other for which

post-memory can serve as a model: as I can ‘remember’ my parents’ memories, I can also

‘remember’ the suffering of others...” [21]

Dani Levy, in the guise of Simon Rosenthal, embodies this Jewish sensitivity universally attuned to

the victimization of the Other. His subsequent film Meschugge develops some major themes

broached in the former short but orients them to an unexpected generic change: The sub-genre of

the anti-Nazi- hunt thriller, necessarily vowed to extinction. It seems as if the whole complex plot

develops from the furtive snapshot, also evoked in Meschugge, of the two little girls playing

together, one Jewish and marked for annihilation, the other not. In Meschugge, it becomes the

origin and the tautological outcome of the film, as the two little girls have exchanged identities. It

allows the Jewish child to leave Germany untouched, and after the collapse of the Third Reich, it

permits the German family to hide their Nazi past and to continue to run the prosperous, previously

Jewish firm. The film once more presents powerful Mother figures -the former girl-friends- versus

the blatant absence of fathers. Pitted against the pervasive presence of omnipotent Nazis in the

German political public sphere, Meschugge introduces a character belonging to the Jewish Defense

League whose demeanor is incompatible with Simon ‘s compliant attitude. But David, again played

by Levy, differs also from his former alter- ego because he has been raised in the pluralistic,

multicultural American society. Therefore, he can fall in love with Lena, the grand-child of a former

Nazi. Unintentionally, their embrace faces the Twin- Towers of the World Trade Center...

For Gertrud Koch, it is this redemptive stance which opens perhaps for the third generation a new

space of hope, inconceivable in the gloomy New German Cinema of the Seventies [22] . However,

instead of waiting for a sequel to the episode-films of 1977 and 1993, we may more simply state

that we are once more enjoying the multifarious charm of autofiction, the fictionalization of lived

experience.

[1] Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. “ Une Critique Dialogique? ” in Le Debat 29, pp.158-166.

[2] Lecarme, Jacques et Vercier, Bruno. 1989. “Premieres Personnes” in Le Debat 54, pp.435-456.

[3] Lecarme, Jacques. 1988. “La Legitimation du Genre” in Cahiers de Semiotique Textuelle 12, pp.21-79.

[4] Portuges, Catherine. 1988. “Seeing Subjects: Women Directors and Cinematic Autobiography” in Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (eds) Life/Lines:Theorizing Women’s Autobiography.Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

[5] Elizabeth Bruss. 1980. “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film” in James Olney (ed) Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[6] Lejeune, Philippe. 1975. Le Pacte Autobiographique. Paris. Le Seuil.

[7] Marcus, Laura. 1994. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory,Criticism,Practice. Manchester, Manchester University Press.

[8] Lecarme, Jacques. 2000. “Cinema et Autobiographie” in Positif 470, pp.61-64.

[9] Colonna, Vincent. 1989. L’Autofiction: Essai sur la Fictionnalisation de soi en litterature. Paris. These EHESS.

[10] Paech, Joachim. 1996. Zweimal ‘Deutschland im Herbst’: 1977 und 1992” in Kinoschriften 4,Wien, Synema.

[11] Chiantaretto, Jean-Francois. 1995. De l’Acte Autobiographique. Champ-Vallon/PUF.

[12] Portuges, Catherine. 1988. Art.cit.

[13] Hirsch, Marianne. 2001. “Surviving Images: Holocaust photographs and the work of PostMemory” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14/1.pp.5-37.

[14] Hirsch, Marianne. 1993. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory”, Discourse, 15/3 pp. 3-30.

[15] Cohen, Arthur.A. 1981. The Tremendum. New-York. Cross Roads.

[16] Langer, Lawrence. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of Memory“ New-Haven, Yale University Press.

[17] Friedlander, Saul(1996)"Trauma,Memory and Transference" Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory,edited by Geoffrey Hartman,Oxford,Blackwell.pp.252-263.

[18] Hirsch, Marianne.1996. “ Past Lives: Post-Memories in Exile” Poetics Today, 17/4, pp.659-686.

  [19] Hirsch, Marianne. 2001. Art.cit.

[20] Landsberg, Alison. 1997. “America, the Holocaust and the Mass-Culture of Memory” in New German Critique, 71, pp. 63-86.

  [21] Hirsch, Marianne. 2001. Art.cit.

[22] Koch, Gertrud. Lecture given at Haifa University in December 2001.