7.15. Uprooted: Exile and refugee's Memories [ES/EN]

The notion of “Germanness” constitutes a contested terrain, profoundly shaped by historical traumas, including the Holocaust, the legacy of German colonialism, and Germany’s evolving role in a globalized world. In recent years, rising anti-immigration sentiments across German and European societies have intensified, exacerbating ongoing debates about who belongs to Germany and under what conditions. Offering a pivotal contribution to these discourses, Jenny Erpenbeck’s literary oeuvre- specifically her novel “Gehen, Ging, Gegangen” serves as the central case study for this article’s examination of how contemporary collective German identity (Germanness) is contested and renegotiated at the intersection of memory politics and migration policy. It poses the central research question: How do colonial memories and contemporary migration experiences interact to shape Germany's collective memory and its conception of Germanness? Employing close reading informed by postcolonial memory studies, particularly Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, the article examines Erpenbeck’s narrative strategies- such as the interactions between African refugees and a retired German professor—to deconstruct racist underpinnings of current German asylum policies and reveal intricate entanglements of Holocaust and colonial pasts. By juxtaposing historical and contemporary memories, Erpenbeck critiques the exclusionary tendencies of German migration policies and foregrounds empathy, shared responsibility and humanity as a basis for redefining “Germanness”, which further serves to dismantle static notions of belonging. Ultimately, the article argues that Erpenbeck’s work possesses a transformative potential: by interrogating the nexus of memory, migration, and identity to address historical traumas and contemporary challenges, it offers a new paradigm for national identity based on solidarity and shared responsibility, thereby underscoring literature’s vital role in envisioning a more ethical and compassionate society.

In times of great national crises, refugees have taken to sea in hopes of resettling in safer, more democratic nations. Unfortunately, those destinations may not live up to their imagined hospitality. The stories of both the MS St. Louis and the Left to Die Boat feature individuals fleeing their war torn, hostile homes for what they presumed would be safety. Instead, the Jews aboard the MS St. Louis in 1939 and the rubber boat of Libyan refugees in 2011 were denied entry, forced to attempt to float to new destinations. This research seeks to understand these two vessels as floating sites of memory, simultaneously present in the reality of those aboard the boats and virtually nonexistent to those on land, nationless in the democratic space of the sea. Using Walter Benjamin's The Storyteller and The Task of the Translator, and Jacques Derrida's writings on hospitality, this paper will focus on two visual narratives of each boat's story: Art Spiegelman's 2007 comic "The St. Louis Refugee Blues" and Forensic Architecture's The Left to Die Boat online report. Spiegelman's work features his Maus alter ego narrating the story of the St. Louis through a series of comics that were originally published in 1939. His comic, published on the 70th anniversary of the voyage, is essentially a retelling through other retellings: memories through those who read about or heard about the event rather than those who bore witness. Conversely, Forensic Architecture combined survivor testimonies with satellite imagery and wind and sea current data to reconstruct the harrowing tale, eventually using their visual and textual narratives for legal recourse for the victims. Each approach offers a framework for understanding how we both retell stories of forced displacement and translate those stories for new audiences, crafting spaces of watery memory floating through time.

More than five decades have passed since the coup d'état in Chile led by Augusto Pinochet, yet scholarly interest in that period (Lebeau 2018, Passig, Ceardi 2023, Verdugo 2023) and in the international solidarity efforts – such as those by the Italian government – toward those fleeing the Regime's violent repression remains considerable (Robolledo, Gonzalez 2010, De Masi 2013, Mignini 2017, Nocera 2017). This study sets out to examine the initiatives undertaken in support of the Chilean cause in the city of Parma, Italy, and to delineate the network of aid and fundraising that was mobilized within the urban context. Employing a media analysis framework applied to video interviews with Chilean exiles residing in Parma, this work scrutinizes the testimonies compiled in the documentary "Una questione di solidarietà. Storie di esuli cileni" (A Question of Solidarity: Stories of Chilean Exiles", Cossu, Rossetti, Tore, 2023). The primary objective is to identify the recurrent thematic elements within the protagonists' recollections concerning their narratives of Chile, the socio-political context of the time, and the reception they encountered upon their arrival in Italy. A further intention is to interrogate the "media memory" (Cati, 2013) constructed through these video-testimonies, thereby reflecting upon the evidentiary value of the audiovisual source itself (Garofalo, Roghi 2015, Cavallotti, Lotti, Mariani 2015). This inquiry extends to the processes of shaping a shared public memory and to the subsequent political instrumentalization of the event. This investigation ultimately seeks to illuminate the inherent challenges in confronting established narratives and in critically re-examining a past that has been profoundly idealized (Eltit 2022).

Exile as a borderland identity configuration in Verónica Gerber Bicecci's novel Conjunto Vacío This work explores the condition of being a “daughter of exile” in Verónica Gerber Bicecci's graphic novel Conjunto Vacío (2021) and the process configuration of the “argenmex” identity (Valderrama Abad and Argañaraz, 2024) as a consequence of her parents' forced exile to Mexico during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), as well as the author's birth in the host country. The borderland identities that characterize this type of experience reflect a back-and-forth between her parents' country and her own, which generates constant movement (Mata, 2023) since she writes in a language that is not exactly the same (Torras Francés, 2024). In this sense, the implication of this exile experience understood as an extraterritorial process (Martínez, Gras, and Ternicier, 2024) not only produces a hybridity in terms of language, but also generates an affect of the body that encodes family legacies and strains her condition as a foreigner. Framed within the narratives of daughters of exiles recently produced, the novel by this “daughter of exile” uses the dialogue between words and images to dismantle the category of identity as something fixed and, based on her fragmentary memories, unfolds a story that recounts the chosen inheritance that she, as the legatee, reconfigures in another way (Derrida and Roudinesco, 2002). Likewise, family ties (Amado and Domínguez, 2004) are narrated through certain objects that populate the novel (Alberione, 2024) and allow the plot of exile to unfold as an extraterritorial experience.

This paper considers the power of performance to challenge forgetting and silencing of the past, to commemorate cultural loss, and to enact hope within a community of exiles. It explores the impact on the Latin American theatre scene (and Uruguay in particular) of Spanish practitioners who went into exile there following the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Their work reminds us of the transnational history of Latin American theatre, and also connects it to the civil war memories silenced by the Franco dictatorship in Spain, memories that were publicly recalled by the exile community in acts of resilience and resistance. Many of these exiles were, or came to be, identified with the lost Republic and to symbolise hope for a return to the homeland. While for most, this was a hope not realised in their lifetime, I argue that these exiled practitioners employed a combination of productive nostalgia and optimism to transmit ideas about the past, to create new forms of belonging in the present and to engage creatively with future-orientated memories of the lost Republic. Finally, and briefly, I will ask how these experiences from nearly a century ago might be relevant today.