Unclaimed and Unclaimable. Memories of the RAF
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Gerald Siegmund
This essay deals with the traumatic memory of the RAF, a German terrorist group from the 1970s, as staged by two theatre productions, Klaus Michael Grüber's Winterreise from 1977 and Nicolas Stemann's Ulrike Maria Stuart from 2006. Despite their very different aesthetics, Grüber and Stemann share artistic strategies of dealing with history in the theatre in general and the history of the RAF in particular. Rather than creating a fictional world that remembers and represents past events as completed acts, both directors use metonymic devices to deconstruct space and character, situation and speech. They transpose historic events into a performative play with absences rather than presences, thereby spectralising the past and asking the audience to assume its position in the unfolding spectrum of remaining questions and contradictions. Thus the essay proposes a form of memory specific to the aesthetic experience: ‘aesthetic memory’ is not primarily concerned with creating continuity and stabilizing identities, but with keeping the questions of the past open.
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction. Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film. Between Representation and Experience
- Hitchcock, the Holocaust, and the Long Take: Memory of the Camps
- Playing Soldiers at the Edge of Imagination. Hotel Modern and the Representation of the Unrepresentable
- On the Charge of Memory. Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation
- Mediating Memories. The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship
- The Violin Player, the Soccer Game and the Wall-Graffiti. Rhetorical Strategies in the Border-Regions between Israel and Palestine
- Mourning as Method. William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noir
- “‘It's about us!’. Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theatre
- Beyond Medusa. Recovering History on Stage
- Unclaimed and Unclaimable. Memories of the RAF
- Afterimages. Post-Holocaust, Posttraumatic, and Postcolonial Cinemas
- Das Warten auf den Herrensignifikanten oder: Die Verhandlung von Zufall, Zeichen und Notwendigkeit in Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 als Kritik des Indizienparadigmas
- Von der “(Un)Möglichkeit, sich in die Fremde hineinzuleben”. Kulturelle Assimilation als Desintegration am Beispiel von Ilija Trojanows Roman Der Weltensammler
- Rezensionen
- Liste der Mitarbeiter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction. Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film. Between Representation and Experience
- Hitchcock, the Holocaust, and the Long Take: Memory of the Camps
- Playing Soldiers at the Edge of Imagination. Hotel Modern and the Representation of the Unrepresentable
- On the Charge of Memory. Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation
- Mediating Memories. The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship
- The Violin Player, the Soccer Game and the Wall-Graffiti. Rhetorical Strategies in the Border-Regions between Israel and Palestine
- Mourning as Method. William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noir
- “‘It's about us!’. Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theatre
- Beyond Medusa. Recovering History on Stage
- Unclaimed and Unclaimable. Memories of the RAF
- Afterimages. Post-Holocaust, Posttraumatic, and Postcolonial Cinemas
- Das Warten auf den Herrensignifikanten oder: Die Verhandlung von Zufall, Zeichen und Notwendigkeit in Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 als Kritik des Indizienparadigmas
- Von der “(Un)Möglichkeit, sich in die Fremde hineinzuleben”. Kulturelle Assimilation als Desintegration am Beispiel von Ilija Trojanows Roman Der Weltensammler
- Rezensionen
- Liste der Mitarbeiter
