While the Holocaust functions as a lynchpin of memory studies, public and scholarly attention has scarcely been paid to convergences between Holocaust memory and disability studies. Through a comparative study of two Holocaust memorials in Grafeneck, Germany and in Trieste, Italy, Susanne C. Knittel’s The Historical Uncanny emphasizes the need to consider intersections between disability, memory, ethnicity, and history in order to comprehend ‘uncanny’ contours of Holocaust memory. Such an inter-disciplinary and intersectional approach, a foundational tenet of a feminist epistemology, is effective to recognize the ways in which hegemony and able-bodiedness take precedence over commemorative practices surrounding the two ‘sites’ of memory.
Building upon the scholarship of Eric Hobsbawm and Pierre Nora, Knittel views a ‘site’ of memory as something that constantly undergoes transformation and resignification. Identifying a major vacuum in Nora’s project, the writer asserts the need to pay attention to the politicization of memory in the context of post-World War II European integration. She holds that a European ‘sites of memory’ project, instead of seeking to form a unitary past, should make space for nuances in local, regional, and national memory. It also should allow each site to participate with its own history in a multivoiced and multidirectional approach to archiving Holocaust memory. While laying the groundwork for a subaltern memory discourse, Knittel warns us about formations of singular and hegemonic memories of the Holocaust that push certain testimonies to the periphery.
Against this backdrop, an inquiry into the role of disability renders significant insights. The concept of ‘uncanny’ makes a notable appearance in this regard. Building upon Sigmund Freud’s use of the term, Knittel articulates the concept as illustrative of ‘the vertiginous intrusion of the past into the present, the sudden awareness that what was familiar has become [alarmingly] strange.’ As such, a site of memory becomes uncanny when its history encroaches upon the present in unexpected ways, making us redefine our positionalities vis-à-vis dominant memory and historical discourses around it. In the first half of the book, the writer examines the politics of memory surrounding the memorial in Grafeneck in South Germany that commemorates mentally ill and disabled people murdered under the Nazi euthanasia program, a move that preceded the ‘final solution.’ In the second half, she investigates the persecution of Slovenes and Croats in Trieste by the Italian Fascists and the Nazis through a close reading of the Risiera di San Sabba memorial, a former extermination camp. The victims of both sites occupy a marginal position in mainstream discourses of commemoration, and are not usually documented alongside the victims of the Holocaust. By putting the two case studies in conversation with each other, Knittel seeks to show historical ties, parallels, convergences, and divergences between the two memory cultures.
Chapter One presents a close reading of the Grafeneck memorial which commemorates the victims of Nazi euthanasia while functioning as a home for the disabled. Knittel maintains that this ‘historically uncanny’ site, where the past that has been repressed and deliberately forgotten overwhelms its present, renders a reading of Foucauldian heterotopia. In the second chapter, she analyzes several literary texts from the first four decades after the war that depict Nazi euthanasia in a causal relationship with Holocaust memory, such as works by Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Wolfdietrich Schnurre, and identifies a paradigmatic figure – the ‘disabled enabler.’ Accordingly, a socially segregated mentally disabled character utilizes his/her prophetic wisdom to help the able-bodied/minded protagonist in critical situations. Criticizing this seemingly empowered figure as someone who functions to reiterate stereotypes of mental illness and euthanasia, Knittel links the difficulty of adequately commemorating euthanasia victims to prevalent deleterious social norms about disability and mental illness. Chapter Three introduces another important concept in the context of memory and disability: ‘vicarious witnessing,’ the act of giving victims a voice by reclaiming their memory and identity from the bureaucratic and dehumanizing language of the perpetrators. For her, it is an alternative space of commemoration that defies cliché and derogatory representations of disability.
Chapter Four links the histories of Grafeneck and the Risiera di San Sabba by focusing on professional profiles of the perpetrators who worked at both sites. While popular memory discourses mainly focus on victims, Knittel’s decision to examine how perpetrators are remembered at each site is noteworthy. She contends that a critical engagement with victims as well as perpetrators is essential in the pedagogical mission of memorial sites. Reiterating the claims made about hegemonic memory in the previous chapters, in the fifth chapter she stresses that attention should be shifted away from high-profile memory sites to unprivileged, everyday spaces of memory for us to gain a more comprehensive picture of the historical and mnemonic legacies of the region. Chapter Six shows the ways in which Italian television has promoted Italians as victims and ‘good Fascists,’ while Chapter Seven further pursues nuances of literary representations of Trieste and reveals tensions in the process of depicting history and memory.
Knittel’s book is a significant contribution to disability studies and memory studies, both of which have hitherto paid little interest to the historical trajectory of the international eugenics movement, its ideological influence on the Nazi euthanasia program, the silenced victims, and their marginalized memories. On the one hand, the book expands the scholarship on disability studies by critics such as Sharon Snyder, David Mitchell, and Paul Gilroy. On the other, it remarkably participates in the cannon of memory work by becoming a counterpart to many similar projects undertaken by critics such as Lisa Yoneyama, Marita Sturken, Cathy Schlund-Vials, and Elizabeth Jelin, among others. The book transcends the disciplinary boundaries of memory and disability, and offers a postcolonial reading as well. For instance, one can argue that Knittel’s book critically engages with postcolonial questions such as ‘why compare’ raised by R. Radhakrishnan, and ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ by Gayatri Spivak. While articulating the issues in hegemonic representations of memory, The Historical Uncanny becomes a space of an alternative form of justice to those who have been wronged, so long silenced, and deliberately forgotten.
Department of English, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA
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© 2015, Dinidu Karunanayake
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1075950