In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  I bought my little china boy without noting the name of the factory or the stallholder’s telephone number, although I already knew that I was carrying the end of my book in my pocket, the hidden answer to a riddle in a puzzle book. My china boy seemed to embody the way no story reaches us without having its heels chipped off or its face scratched away. And how lacunae and gaps are the constant companions of survival, its hidden engine, fueling its acceleration. How only trauma makes individuals — singly and unambiguously us — from the mass product. And yes, finally, the way in which I am the little boy, the product of mass manufacturing and also of the collective catastrophe of the last century, the survivor and unwitting beneficiary, here by some miracle.

  The china figure I chose was not the unluckiest: the headless ones remained in their box. In some contexts, or so the Vienna School of Art History proclaimed a hundred years ago, only the “new” and the “unimpaired” can be considered beautiful, whereas the pale, faded, and fragmentary can only be considered “ugly.” An object’s dignity, its starched collar, comes from its state of preservation. The poorly preserved object loses its right to human interaction.

  And so it was: although I was thinking about the fragmentary and flawed state of any surviving witness, all the same in my soul I craved the whole, the inviolate. The little china boy’s wounds could not be too extreme, to put it bluntly — I wanted him pleasant to look at. Half-destroyed a century ago, he nevertheless had to look new.

  I remembered, as I took my purchase home, that I had read about these figurines in My Pushkin, a memoir of childhood by the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. She remembers her strolls as a child along the Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow toward the Pushkin Memorial:

  There was another special game I played with the Pushkin Memorial, it was my game, and it was this: I’d place a tiny white china doll, the size of a little finger, a child’s little finger, on the pedestal. You could buy these dolls in the china shops that appeared in Moscow at the end of the century, little gnomes under mushrooms and children holding umbrellas. I’d place a tiny figure on the gigantic pedestal and slowly lift my gaze up the sheer granite face until I thought my head would fall off comparing the sizes. [ . . . ] The Pushkin Memorial, with me under it, and with the tiny figure under me, was my first proper lesson in hierarchy, too. I was a giant next to the china figure, but next to Pushkin, I was — myself. A little girl. But one who would grow bigger. And I was the same for the tiny figure as the Pushkin Memorial was for me. But then what was the Pushkin Memorial for the tiny figure? And after some hard thinking it suddenly dawned upon me: The Memorial was so enormous that the figure simply couldn’t see it. I thought it was a big house, or a rumble of thunder. And the china figure was so tiny that the Pushkin Memorial couldn’t see it either. It thought it was just a flea. But it saw me! Because I was big and plump. And I would soon grow bigger.

  Over the years the little figure didn’t stop giving lessons (Tsvetaeva counts these lessons in numbers, in scale and materials, in numbers and hierarchy, and in thinking). It’s hardly surprising that the subject of her studies changed. I thought about it as I carried the little china boy in my pocket along this or that strasse, stroking his invisible back with my finger and imagining how he would look on the cover of a book about memory. His lack of arms made him look taller than he was, he looked straight ahead like a curly-haired figurehead, he wore old-fashioned knee-high socks, and he gleamed white. One rainy evening he fell out of my pocket and smashed on the tiled floor of the old house.

  The boy broke into three pieces: his stockinged feet slipped under the bath’s deep belly, his body lay severed from his head. What had struggled to symbolize wholeness in my own and my family’s history had, in one fell swoop, become an allegory: the impossibility of telling these histories, the impossibility of saving anything at all, and my inability to gather myself up from the splinters of someone else’s past, or even to take it on as my own convincingly. I picked up what I could from the ground and placed the pieces on the desk like jigsaw pieces. It was beyond repair.

  6. A Love Interest

  On my last day in Vienna I went back to two different places, both terribly alike, both models of preservation, storage devices designed for the remnants of human existence, for what will be left when we are no longer.

  In the Michaelerkirche’s crypt, human bones were arranged and inventoried in a beautifully clear system. The bones had collected over hundreds of years under the church, and someone had organized them by type and size, tibia to fibula, laid in neat heaps like firewood. Smooth skulls were heaped elsewhere. The guide had the terrifying cheerfulness of a scout leader, she pushed us this way, then that, she made jokes about the transience of earthy existence, she pointed out the fantastically preserved little shoes and the silk corset of a pregnant woman with a dark tuber of a face, exhibited for all to see in a special coffin. Wie hübsch! she exclaimed enthusiastically, really very sweet! And it was true, that there was a kind of hierarchical coziness in her underground realm: whatever hadn’t quite lost its tangibility, and remained more or less undissipated, was laid out for public view. The rest had been dismantled into spare parts and pushed out of sight, to the periphery of oblivion.

  My next stop was the Josephinum, a museum of human anatomy, or at least how they conceived of anatomy in the nineteenth century: the body a temple, eager to display its inner sanctum to the enlightened visitor. The Josephinum is a museum of medical science and my visit was by way of a bow to the complicated art of medical science, and also to my great-grandmother Sarra and her Bulgarian lover, who received his medical diploma in Vienna. What was once the gleaming pinnacle of medical knowledge, the last word in technical achievement and the object of professorial pride, looks much like a cabinet of curiosities now, a monument to ancient arts practiced by starched nurses and doctors with mustaches. Pipes and tiny hammers lay idle alongside surgical instruments, clamps and scissors and iron-beaked microscopes — all of it useless. Without their owners the objects took on the air of curios and lay under the glass like the rattles and swaddling of a profession that has long since grown up. The only things that hadn’t grown old were the bodies, so to speak.

  The bodies in the Josephinum had not aged like their corruptible counterparts. They were made of pure beeswax to celebrate the Enlightenment, the rational mind, and the benefit of teaching aids — a whole regiment of them, more than a thousand anatomical models, commissioned by Emperor Joseph II and manufactured in Florence under the watchful eye of Paolo Mascagni, philosopher and free thinker and the author of the Treatise of Anatomy. The models were then transported across the Alps on mules, just as France, aroused from Grenoble to Toulouse, tossed and turned on its bed of revolution. Then they were floated down the Danube to be exhibited in the interests of science, and here they all are, alive and proud as athletes on the podium in their boxes of tulipwood and glass.

  Rational man is served up like a dish in this museum, his belly sliced open and his waxy organs laid out like a plat du jour: a varnished liver; testicles swinging comically on their little ropes. Some of the waxworks are resting on their elbows, some sprawled out, naked to their skeletons, or, wearing their red flesh in bundles tied with veins, they show off their ribbed muscle fiber, fatty tissue, the nifty combs of bone in foot and hand. Marquesses have their curly heads tipped back so the wriggling pipework of the neck is visible. All of it is haunted by the indifference of immortality: the crotch’s cradle, the pearl on an untouched neck, the body’s workings laid bare like a music box.

  The Josephinum felt like another response to the question I had been turning over in my mind. These beautiful inanimate bodies had lost their reason for being (teaching aids, witnesses, explications) and were empty shells, like the carriages and coffee pots in other museums. Objects falling out of currency slowly lose their defining qualities and turn a new nonhuman face toward us. They return to the materials from whence they came, wax, paint, and clay. The past rew
ilds itself, oblivion springs up out of it like a forest.

  *

  Eight years ago a friend was putting together a book of interviews with writers. In these interviews the writers were encouraged to talk about themselves, their childhood, early years, the friendships and conflicts that defined them, their early and not-so-early work. It was a marvelous book. My interview wasn’t included. We made two attempts, with two years in between the attempts, but nothing worked. There was something extraordinary about the recorded interviews, but they were of no use for the book. Both of the recordings were like two peas in the pod: they made the same key points, the conversations climbed a route scattered with the same anecdotes — and they revealed nothing at all about me. It was almost funny how absent I was. Over the many pages of typescript I scrutinized my family legacy, jumped through the branches of the family tree, and made a virtuoso performance of avoiding any mention of myself. I answered direct questions, of course, but my answers were so drab and reluctant: born here, studied there, read and wrote this and that . . . But what delight I took in somersaulting in midair and diving deep into the free waters of the lives of my unknown ancestors! As a result of this reticence about my own practice, nothing of the interviews could be used. I kept the recordings like the X-rays of a fracture, just in case, and a few years later they actually did come in handy.

  I was reading Marianne Hirsch’s classic work, The Generation of Postmemory, as if it were a travel guide to my own head. I knew everything she described immediately and intimately: the ceaseless fascination with one’s family’s past (and, beyond this, with the densely populated human context for these lives, the thick undercoat of sounds and smells, the coincidences and concurrences, the synchronized turning of the wheels of history) and the clinical boredom with which I roll my own contemporary world backward to that past, back to them, and feel quite certain, in-my-gut certain, of how it was back then, the streetcar routes, the stockings that sagged around the knees, the music from the loudspeaker. Any story about myself became a story about my ancestors. There they were behind me like an opera chorus encouraging my aria — only the music was written seventy years ago. The structures that emerged from the black waters of history fought shy of linearity, their natural state was copresence, the simultaneous sounding of voices from the past, contradicting the obvious: time and slow disintegration.

  The work of postmemory is an attempt to animate these structures, to give them body and voice, to revitalize them in accordance with one’s own experience and understanding. This is how Odysseus called forth the souls of the dead, and they flew down in clouds, crying out like birds at the smell of sacrificial blood. He chased them off, allowing only the ones he wished to talk with to come near to the fire. The blood was a prerequisite, no conversation could happen without it. Now to make the dead speak we have to give them space in our own bodies and minds, carry them inside us like the unborn. And yet the burden of postmemory is placed on children’s shoulders: the second and third generations of those who survived and who allow themselves to look back.

  Hirsch sets the boundaries of postmemory with deliberate rigor. The term itself was invented for and applied within the field of Holocaust studies, the funneling space that was left in the aftermath of catastrophe. The reality she describes is taken directly from her own personal experience, which continually informs her approach. It’s the day-to-day experience of those whose parents and grandparents measured their history from the catastrophe of European Jewry as once history was calculated from the flood. It can’t be reckoned with, or pushed aside, because it will always be the starting point, the inescapable pretext for their existence. The need to constantly bring forth the memory of events (remembrance as the highest form of posthumous justice) has a particular quality. This knowledge, both inexplicable and unbearable, blinds like a flash of light whichever way you turn away from it. In its glare anything that has no direct relationship with then loses its significance: it has failed the test of the ultimate experience of injustice.

  From here comes the unrelenting and troubled magnification of the past in the consciousness of those who are still within its grip. Perhaps those who were allowed to escape their fate feel this more acutely, those who did not pass through the extermination camps, but who were, in Hirsch’s words: “survivors of persecution, ghettoization, and displacement.” The survivor’s situation leads to its own ethical quandary. It’s hard not to feel that the place you occupy in this world could be filled by another, and by rights it should be filled by this destroyed and unfulfilled other life. In The Drowned and the Saved Primo Levi tells us with absolute candor: “The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died.”

  Those who weren’t “the best,” those who benefited from geographic and biographical chance, the luck of the draw (as far as luck was possible, then or now), are forced to act according to an invisible imperative. This is not only to strive to be better than you were cut out to be, it has something to do with the constant sense of the world as an apartment that has just been abandoned. The owners are gone and we are left sitting on their orphaned divans, under photographs of strangers, learning to call them family without really having the right to do so.

  This unchanging angle of vision, whereby the past inhabits the present, is a particular sort of enchanted state. It has such a powerful effect, like a light filter or sunglasses, sometimes obliterating the present day, sometimes tinting it. The impossibility of saving the already perished makes the gaze particularly intense — if not Medusa, whose stare petrified the disappearing world, turning it into a monument, then Orpheus’s arresting gaze, momentary, photographic, tipping inanimate into animate.

  Many people are now occupied by attempts to draw memory out from its hiding places, from the womb-like darkness of “personal history,” and to make it seen and heard. Judging by the numbers of films and books appearing, it’s a comprehensive salvaging operation. Even private love stories have become something like a collective project. Its aim is akin to Hannah Arendt’s description of the difference between the warm accumulation of communities cast out of the world into nonexistence, and the lit public space where the world began. Hirsch describes postmemory not as a project or even a particular type of contemporary sensibility, but as something far broader: “It’s not a movement, method or idea; I see it, rather, as a structure of inter- and transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove.”

  Postmemory, then, is a kind of internal language, establishing horizontal and vertical lines of transmission (and cutting out those who have no right to speak it). It is, besides this, a petri dish in which reality itself is transformed, changing its colors and its usual affinities. Susan Sontag once described photography in a similar way: “Photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.” Like language, like photography, postmemory is far more than its obvious function. It doesn’t just show us the past, but changes the present, because the past is the key to everything that occurs daily in the present.

  The circle of those who are involved in the heat transfer between past and present is much wider than those who feel a link with the history of Europe’s Jews, or with the trauma wound, which makes a tear in time’s matter at the point of no return, the border between then and now. This border, as depicted by familial memory, spoken memory, is too much like the border between the time of innocence and the time of — let’s call it the twilit time. Grandmother’s memories, great-grandmother’s memoirs, great-grandfather’s photographs — all are witnesses of “then,” of the inviolate world, when everything was in its place, and might have remained so if darkness had not descended. In this respect, postmemory is ahistorical, but the very dichotomy of memory and history lives in the air we breathe, and it has become fashionable to prefer one over the other
.

  *

  Memory is handed down, history is written down; memory is concerned with justice, history with preciseness; memory moralizes, history tallies and corrects; memory is personal, history dreams of objectivity; memory is based not on knowledge, but on experience: compassion with, sympathy for a desperate pain demanding immediate involvement. At the same time the landscape of memory is strewn with projections, fantasies, and misrepresentations — the ghosts of today, with their faces turned to the past. Hirsch writes:

  The images already imprinted on our brains, the tropes and structures we bring from the present to the past, hoping to find them there and to have our questions answered, may be screen memories — screens on which we project present, or timeless, needs and desires and which thus mask other images and other, as yet unthought or unthinkable concerns.

  In some senses postmemory treats the past as raw material, destined for editing. “Invariably, archival photographic images appear in postmemorial texts in altered form: they are cropped, enlarged, projected onto other images; they are reframed and de- or recontextualized; they are embedded in new narratives, new texts; they are surrounded by new frames.” (Hirsch). In their original form they are akin to food it would be unthinkable to eat raw, before the necessary, complicated, and careful preparation.

  The problem is that the petri dish of postmemory — or new memory — is far larger than the circle of things and phenomena informing Hirsch’s work. Because twentieth-century history spread its cataclysms liberally around the globe, most people alive can consider themselves survivors to some extent, the result of a traumatic shift, its victims and the bearers of its legacy, people with something to remember and to call back to life at the expense of their own today. And perhaps also because the world of the living and the world of the dead coexist in exactly this way: we live in their houses, we eat from their plates, but we forget these previous owners, we throw out their fragile reality, putting our own thoughts and hopes in its place, editing and abridging as we see fit, until time sweeps us into that corner where we ourselves become the past.