Remembering Guilt: Central European Collective Memory in Theatrical Reflection
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In May 1945, thousands of people from German ethnic minority living in Moravia in today’s Czech Republic were forcibly expelled from their homes. The plan was to pressure the German people, including many women and children, to walk to neighboring Austria. However, most of them never made it, dying on their way due to various diseases and injuries, or staying in an involuntary-refugee camp in Pohořelice which served as a concentration camp during the war. This issue has never been addressed by the government, general public or artists in the Czech Republic until very recently. In 2015, the city of Brno organized The Year of Reconciliation, a festival attempting to point out to the terrors caused by Czechs after WWII through various artistic forms, ranging from public readings, exhibitions to theater performances. The aim of the communication is to illuminate how a significant and traumatizing event can be reflected by generations alienated from the historical occurrence itself while simultaneously deeply influenced by it in the form of residual collective guilt and perpetual unconscious experience. How can a memory of the survivors, witnesses or aggressors be represented in art and especially on a theatrical stage, with its immediate, ephemeral effect, through the eyes of contemporary experimental theater-makers? What we perceive to be a memory is always a construct influenced by what we are today. Memories of historical tragedies may get corrupted by ideology or artificially constructed narratives. Is the role of an artist to deconstruct these narratives and reach towards a “pure“ memory? The communication should also question the ethics of representation of horrifying experiences on the stage through documentary theater in the age of art-commodity subjugated to market logic. Is reconciliation through theater possible and if so, how does that influence our historical narratives, ideological positions and lived experience of today? |