Christine Berberich

Affective landscapes: an Introduction

This essay examines, in Ben Highmore’s words, the implications of “a materialist turn towards the immaterial, towards affect, towards thinglyness, the senses” and how this might be determined by “the social world that produced them.” In viewing the “social,” or “sociocultural,” as always affective, and in viewing the significance of landscape in terms of how people define themselves and their relations to the world, this essay explores affect’s key role in countering entrenched, predefined systems of thought and feeling and its potential for, in Jacques Ranciere’s terms, “redistributing the sensible.”

Introduction: the Holocaust in contemporary culture

Picture the following scene: an ice-skating rink. The lights are dimmed, but a spotlight seeks out a couple in the middle of the ice. Instead of sequins and sparkly spandex, though, both are dressed in concentration camp striped pyjamas, with Stars of David on prominent display. Music begins slowly and haltingly to only become louder and more powerful. To the strains of the theme tune of the acclaimed Italian film La vita è bella (1997), the couple begin to perform a Holocaust-themed ice-dancing revue that features pretend shooting, guard dogs barking, and that ends with the sound of machine gun fire. Throughout the performance, both skaters smile broadly. Their emotional dance ends in raucous applause from the spectators and a perfect score from the ring-side judges. No. This is not a tasteless imagined scenario. It is a very real performance that featured on the Russian reality show Ice Age in November 2016. The skaters were the former Olympic ice-dancer Tatyana Navka and her partner Andrew Burkovsjy – and maybe, just maybe, the performance would not have received quite so much media attention worldwide if Tatyana Navka had not happened to be the wife of Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Although studio audience and show judges seemed to ‘enjoy’ the performance – one can only hope that the judgment was based on its athletic and not its ethical value – it received strong condemnation in the international news media. Jeremy Jones, the Director of International Affairs at Australia’s Israel and Jewish Affair Council, considered the performance ‘unbelievably tasteless.’ In an interview with CNN he condemned ‘the lack of thought’ behind the performance and predicted that ‘long after they’re forgotten as ice skaters they’ll be remembered as people who sunk to such depths to get some celebrity.’ In the run up to the performance, Navka herself had posted images of her upcoming routine on Instagram, urging viewers to witness the performance to remember the Holocaust, and explaining that the film La vita è bella, with its devastating use of humor to highlight horror yet still resulting in a message of hope, was her favorite film. But when the show was broadcast, their performance caused a veritable Twitter storm, with viewers giving full rein to their shock and disgust. Some called it ‘Tasteless. Insensitive. The Holocaust is not happy entertainment’ while others became more personal with comments such as ‘you make me sick.’ The performance also had political undertones – presumably due to Navka’s proximity to Putin and the Russian government – with viewers contacting Russian embassies worldwide; twitter user @nevilleprinsloo tweeted: ‘@EmbassyofRussia I want to lodge a complaint of disgust against your government and Tatyana Navka’s Holocaust themed ice skating show!!’ and demanded that

‘I think I’m beginning to understand. What I’m writing is an infranovel’: Laurent Binet, HHhH and the problem of ‘writing history’

ABSTRACT This chapter assesses the problems of history writing/writing historical fiction. It discusses ongoing debates about the value of Holocaust narratives. Taking its cue from Linda Hutcheons notion of historiographical metafiction, and discussing Laurent Binets novel HHhH, the chapter discusses the idea of historiographical metafiction, fictionalized narratives of historical facts.

Bursting the bubble: Mythical Englishness, then and now

This article assesses the creation of specifically English myths, especially that of the southern English landscape as the one marker of a quintessential Englishness, in the first three decades of the 20th century. Taking H.V. Morton’s In Search of England as a case study, the article shows that Morton consciously created a racially exclusive England steeped in the past. Writing over 70 years after Morton, Joe Bennett in Mustn’t Grumble: In Search of England and the English retraces Morton’s steps and offers a postcolonial deconstruction of the “myths” of England that Morton had so painstakingly created. In the process, Bennett shows that Morton’s image of England still pervades society to this day, and warns of the dangers of uncritically adopting national stereotypes put forward by literature as well as by the tourism and heritage industry.

England, Devolution, and Fictional Kingdoms

In a recent interview with Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, the novelist Ian McEwan was reported as explaining that he was ‘an English writer, not a British one’, and that the ‘celebration of Britishness captured by Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the Olympic Games [… ] was the first experience of his life where a concept of Britishness was being celebrated’ (Carrell 2012, my italics). McEwan’s surprising statement comes at a time when the integrity of the United Kingdom is at issue and when the prospect of Scottish independence highlights again the problematic use of everyday terminology — England, Great Britain, United Kingdom — that is often used wrongly or interchangeably by the general public and cultural critics alike. ‘English, I mean British”, Krishan Kumar states at the beginning of The Making of English National Identity, and explains that ‘this familiar locution alerts us immediately to one of the enduring perplexities of English national identity. How to separate “English” from “British”?’ (Kumar 2003: 1). This conundrum is particularly apt given the current political climate. In the last decade there has been an insistent call for a restatement and a revaluation of a specifically English national identity. But what exactly is Englishness? Cultural and literary critics such as Simon Gikandi (1996), Ian Baucom (1999), Kumar (2003), Jed Esty (2004), Simon Featherstone (2009), and Michael Gardiner (2004; 2012) have convincingly argued that with the emergence of the United Kingdom as a world power in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came the increasing conflation of British and English to the extent that ‘English and British became synonymous’ (Kumar 2004: 63).

‘We shall be punished’: Positionality and post-memory in the work of Rachel Seiffert and Uwe Timm

During the Second World War, the German officer Wilm Hosenfeld, on duty in Poland, wrote about the war atrocities committed by his country, ‘We shall be punished for it. And so will our innocent children, for we are colluding when we allow these crimes to be committed.’ Taking this diary entry as its starting point, this essay assesses Rachel Seiffert’s 2001 novel The Dark Room and Uwe Timm’s 2005 autobiographical novella In My Brother’s Shadow in the light of contemporary German victim and collective guilt discourses, transposing Marianne Hirsch’s term ‘postmemory’ on to the children of the perpetrators.