What we don't know : exploring the inheritance of history through fiction

Abstract

This thesis is composed of a creative component, the novel Hannah and Emil, based on the lives of my grandparents, and an exegesis that examines two contemporary novels dealing with issues similar to those I confront in the creative component: Burning In by Mireille Juchau and The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert. Although there are many narratives based on German experience in the Second World War, Hannah and Emil deals with a group not well known to readers in English, non-Jewish left wing dissidents. Their narrative emerges from the material and non-material effects they left behind: papers, photographs and arcane objects, but also memory and stories, and those things that were left unsaid. This foregrounding of such means of receiving the past situates this novel alongside others, like those of Juchau and Seiffert, that deal with family memory as inheritance. In the novel, Hannah, a Russian Jew brought up in London, leaves her family as a young woman and travels to continental Europe to learn languages. Interested in the lives of working people, she finds herself in Berlin in the 1930s, and then working as a translator for the trade unions in Brussels. There she meets Emil, recently escaped from the Nazis who murdered his father in a wave of violence against the Left. Together Hannah and Emil run a youth hostel in England until in 1940, with invasion from Germany seemingly imminent, the British government arrests thousands of German and Austrian refugees, and transports them on the infamous Dunera to Australia. Hannah and Emil is to an extent a political romance, a story of lives committed to ideals, and to each other. It is also a story about what is lost and what remains in family stories, and what might be imagined into the gaps left behind by previous generations. The exegesis, after giving a brief background on my own inheritance of the materials and stories of family history, centres on Burning In and The Dark Room, novels whose characters also receive their sense of a broader history through family stories, photographs and objects. Applying the ideas of Marianne Hirsch (postmemory), Dominick LaCapra ('empathic unsettlement'), Dori Laub (listening to witnesses) and James Young ('received history'), these readings propose that fiction can express a distinctive knowledge received through mediated forms, a way of knowing marked by what is not known. The exegesis claims that in this way fiction offers an ethical epistemology that allows for the otherness of the past to those trying to understand it in the present.

Date of Award	2012
Original language	English