Inez Baranay’s Ghosts Like Us as a Stolperstein

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Multidirectional Memory Michael Rothberg argues that collective memory is best understood as a network connecting apparently disparate historical traumas. His ethical vision pre-empts the need to compete for the space of remembrance and at the same time promotes cross-cultural understanding. Inez Baranay’s novel Ghosts Like Us (2015) offers compelling evidence of Rothberg’s thesis, extending his investigations of the Nazi genocide and colonial atrocities by placing male violence against women at centre stage. The novel is set in Berlin and features three women artists—Erika Kieler, Trudi Zahn, and Lottie Hoffman—at different moments in history: the 1890s, November 1989, and 2009, respectively. This essay analyses Ghosts Like Us as a metaphorical Stolperstein—a small brass plaque originally commemorating Jewish victims of Nazism. Lottie, a young Australian artist of German ancestry, comes across these “stumbling stones” in contemporary Berlin as she is preparing to perform in a cabaret show marking the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall. In the novel, the Stolpersteine function as multidimensional symbols coupling the Jewish genocide with that of Indigenous Australians, and, by extension, with the victims of sexist violence, as both Erika and Trudi are murdered by male fellow artists, and Lottie is haunted by a similar fate. The fact that each protagonist belongs to a period coinciding with the modern, the postmodern, and the contemporary, invites framing the analysis within transmodernity as the sociohistorical label for our times. By drawing on Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory and on Victoria Browne’s theory of polytemporality and “complex coevalness,” my analysis of Ghosts Like Us shows that the synergistic interweaving of the lives and memories of the three protagonists fosters cross-cultural understanding and a new transmodern ethical sensibility.