This PhD thesis examines the ‘working through’ of traumatic memories of the Holocaust and representations of Romani cultural identity in autobiographical writing by Romanies in Germany and Austria. In writing their memories in German, these Romani writers ended the ‘muteness’ previously surrounding their own experiences of persecution in the Third Reich and demanded an end to the official silence regarding the Romani Holocaust in their home countries. The thesis aims to explore how the writing of these narratives works to create a space for Romani memories within German language written tradition and to assert a more positive Romani identity and space for this identity in their homelands. Further, it aims to demonstrate that, in the struggle to create this safe space, their texts also reveal insecurity and landscapes that are not free from threat. The thesis also addresses the broad question of whether or not the shift from oral to written tradition in order to represent experiences of the Holocaust will result in a continuation of Romani writing in Germany and Austria. The thesis begins by examining the first Romani accounts of Holocaust memories published in Germany (1985) and Austria (1988) and ends with more recent narratives published in 2006 (Germany) and 2007 (Austria). In chapters one and two on writing by Philomena Franz and Ceija Stojka, I focus on their pioneering texts as assertions of space for Romani identity within their homelands; I analyse how these authors work through their traumatic memories by narrating their experiences and by identifying the landscapes of Germany and Austria as Heimat. In chapter 3, I continue to explore themes of Heimat and identity in Alfred Lessing and Karl Stojka ’s accounts which, while working through their own traumatic memories of the Third Reich, struggle with the loss of Romani cultural identity in their homelands. In chapter four, I address the generational memory of the Holocaust in Otto Rosenberg’s account of his experiences in the concentration camps and his daughter Marianne Rosenberg’s recent autobiography. In chapter 5, I will examine the presence of the ‘threat of Auschwitz’ in Stefan Horvath’s writing, in which he remembers the attack on a Romani settlement in 1995 which killed his son and three other Romanies in Oberwart, Austria. In all of these chapters, attention will also be given to the editorial construction of these texts as well as their reception. Throughout the thesis, I take a comparative approach, referring to similarities and differences between the works of these authors.

This thesis investigates the problem of historical representation in the context of the contemporary turns to trauma and memory visible in cultural theory and in wider popular culture and contemporaneous with post-Cold war ‘end of history’ discourse. Rather than apply the theories of trauma to readings of contemporary texts, the present study proposes that trauma theory be seen as part of the wider cultural tendency towards memorialization, characterized by a privileging of the notion of witnessing, an emphasis on the punctuality of the traumatic moment, and the fetishization of the historical trace. This thesis argues that what unites these various features of memorial culture is a notion of history that emphasises both the impossibility of comprehension and representation and yet a sense of proximity to a literal past through the traces that remain. If postmodernism designates a ‘crisis of historicity’ which delegitimizes the authority of representations of history, to think history through the prisms of memory and trauma reasserts a notion of historical truth, albeit relocated in the traumatic memory of the survivor, in the ethical imperative to bear witness, or in an aesthetics of the aporia. The parallel discourses of history as trauma and history as memory conflate the problems of historical representation with problems of historical witnessing, and in doing so conceptualize a notion of an historical event with no actor, proposing instead a passive subject without agency and thus without politics. The thesis is organized through close readings of four key texts, each of which can be read to be in dialogue with wider memorial culture, but which also problematize the orthodoxies of contemporary trauma theory in its application to the literary text—Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project. Focusing on notions of witnessing, testimony, traumatic memory and the trace, and drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière, this thesis sets out to resist the theoretical creep that would see all history as trauma and all text as testimony, and instead reasserts the necessary role of fiction and the imagination in constructing a relationship to the past.

Through a study of the work of three important writers, this thesis engages with the traumatic memories of the second half of the twentieth century in Czechoslovakia in order to highlight the value of literature in widening critical understandings of the continuing legacy of this complex era, which was dominated by totalitarian regimes under the Communist governments which gained control after the upheaval of the Second World War. Whilst these years were not unilaterally traumatic, many lives were dramatically affected by border closures and by the experience of living under a regime that maintained control through methods including confiscation of property, surveillance, arbitrary imprisonment, show trials, and executions. Many of the stories of this era could not be published openly because of censorship, and the persecution of intellectuals led to a wave of emigration, during which a number of writers moved to France. Using theories of trauma, exile, illness, and of self and other, this thesis opens up a dialogue between the work of three writers who engage, albeit from very different perspectives, with this little-explored intersection between Czech and French. The first chapter explores Daniela Hodrová's translated Prague trilogy as a first-hand witness to her nation's dispossession and as a form of resistance to the deletion of memory. The second chapter considers the painful transgenerational legacy of the era as it plays out in the work of bilingual writer Jean-Gaspard Páleníček. Chapter Three considers the ways in which the Prague novels of established French author Sylvie Germain negotiate the fine line between an appropriation of the stories of the other and a moral responsibility to bear witness. By bringing these authors together for the first time and locating their work within French Studies, my work foregrounds the need for Western criticism to pay attention to other valuable voices who can contribute to our understandings of the traumatic experience that has shaped modern history.

In this thesis, a semi-autobiographical manga, Hadashi no Gen, written by Nakazawa Keiji, is analyzed through the lens of trauma theory. By using trauma theory, I hope to shed light on in what way trauma might affect narrative techniques and in what way the narrative techniques convey trauma and emotion to the reader. For the analysis “Trauma Fiction” by Anne Whitehead was chosen and categories based on her findings were made. The categories are: Intertextuality, repetition, dispersed and fragmented narrative voice, memory place, choiceless choice and fantastic. I discovered that all these themes, observed in other trauma fiction as well, are more or less used as a narrative tool in Hadashi no Gen. Further I observed that by conveying traumatic events and emotions through a combination of images and language is a powerful tool and might even be more effective than standard prose text

This research examines the issues and visual processes that arise in the production of self-representations derived from literary texts. The construction of a series of photographic and video installations drawing upon T. S Eliot’s poem 'The Waste Land' (1922) allowed for the exploration and analysis of how literature functions as a device to represent autobiographical experience within my media arts practice. The study considered the relevance and usage of the literary source in relation to specific adaptation procedures, in terms of what complexities were encountered and how these were understood. Whilst orthodox film adaptation provided a theoretical framework for initial experimentation, it is argued that my practice is positioned outside this domain, employing alternative methods of visual translation within a fine art context. Having investigated the purpose of my literary interpretations, I conclude that I respond subjectively to the source materials, forming autobiographical associations with particular lines, images, characters, themes or concepts within the text. It was discovered that this fragmentary method of extraction into isolated elements, corresponded with ambiguous visual representation of the self. Placed within the critical context of relevant female practitioners, I was able to detect a number of recurrent, elusive strategies within my own practice that signified a shifting subjectivity. However, it was the identification with Eliot’s subversion of his impersonality theory in later life, which enabled the realisation that literature is used in my work as a means of projection for visualising past trauma and operates as a form of displacement for a confessional practice. The thesis that emerges from my research is that by allowing oneself to respond emotionally and selectively to an existing text through transformative processes of re-enactment, literary adaptation can act as catharsis for the recollection and re-imagining of previously repressed memories.

Evidence from self-reports and laboratory studies suggests that recall of nontrauma autobiographical memories may be disturbed in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but investigations in everyday life are sparse. This study investigated unintentional nontrauma and trauma memories in trauma survivors with and without PTSD (N = 52), who kept an autobiographical memory diary for a week. We investigated whether unintentional nontrauma memories show an overgeneral memory bias and further memory abnormalities in people with PTSD, and whether unintentional trauma memories show distinct features. Compared to the no-PTSD group, the PTSD group recorded fewer nontrauma memories, which were more overgeneral, more often from before the trauma or related to the trauma, were perceived as distant, and led to greater dwelling. Trauma memories were more vivid, recurrent, and present and led to greater suppression and dwelling. Within the PTSD group, the same features distinguished trauma and nontrauma memories. Results are discussed regarding theories of autobiographical memory and PTSD.