Zwischen Nakba, Shoah und Apartheid Nachdenken über Komplizität und Erinnern. (German)

This paper addresses personal implication into three fundamental catastrophes of the 20th century. While these are disjunctive, they are nevertheless interconnected. Such interconnection is demonstrated and exemplifi ed here by germane episodes of the author’s own life and family experience. Her Jewish South African background lets her probe into the remnants of a Palestinian village buried beneath a “South African” Forest in Israel, for which she once raised money as a child; brings her to the small town in Upper Hesse whence her grandmother made a narrow escape to South Africa from Nazi terror; and confronts her with the blank space of what once was Cape Town’s sprawling District Six which lies in the vicinity of where she lives and from where the inhabitants were deported by the Apartheid regime. All three spaces have in common that what makes them important in this refl ection has been obliterated by force and political fi at. In recounting her own experience, including the making of a fi lm on the three contexts, the author traces ways to retrieve mnemonic traces, on a personal level and beyond. At the same time, she demonstrates entanglements of complicity in the processes addressed that any serious treatment has to confront. Such engagement is set against the simplistic and destructive answers to complicity and complexity, ethno-nationalism and identity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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