The Semiotics of Memory: A Draft

Semiotics and Kristallnacht: A Blurb

I have adjusted my initial project proposal to narrow the scope of my investigation. I am concerned with exposing the semiotic importance of the term Kristallnacht by situating it in a linguistic and historical context. Further, I am interested in exploring the linguistic and historical implications of renaming “The Night of Broken Glass” as “The Night of Falling Feathers” – a more accurate visual representation of female testimonies during the November Pogrom of 1938.

Coloring Memory: A Critical Component

The following is an advance of my critical essay. This includes a fully articulated introduction and an outline of my overall argument.

“Our concern with history is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” – Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald

Introduction: Kristallnacht

On the eve of November 9^th, 1938, Nazi occupied Germany witnessed one of the most violent anti-Semitic riots prior to the beginning of World War II. Through November 9^th and 10^th, Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were plundered, destroyed, or defiled across Germany and the recently annexed territories in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Sudetenland. Popularly known as “Kristallnacht,” and translated as “The Night of Crystal” or “The Night of Broken Glass,” the Jewish Pogrom of 1938 was ignited by members of the SA, Hitler Youth, and local communities. Although Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, highly encouraged the event to take place, Kristallnacht is often remembered as the spontaneous public outburst of anti Jewish sentiment that occurred as a result of Ernst Von Rath’s assassination – a German embassy official stationed in Paris.

Kristallnacht marked a Nazi attempt to purify Germany and its annexed territories from the evils of Judaism and its symptoms prior to the war. Kristallnacht also gained symbolic importance after the war and is now regarded as one of the stepping-stones for the complete dehumanization and annihilation of the Jews in Europe. Noting the importance of Kristallancht in World War II and Holocaust historiography, it is pertinent and imperative to examine the significance and implication of the term “Kristallnacht.” According to the United States Holocaust Memorial, “Kristallnacht owes its name to the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets in the wake of the pogrom—broken glass from the windows of synagogues, homes, and Jewish-owned businesses plundered and destroyed during the violence” (cite). “Kristallnacht” is both descriptive and prescriptive in nature. The term unequivocally speaks to the violence enacted towards Jewish communities in Nazi Germany and what the violence consisted of (i.e. the defilement of public spaces occupied or owned by Jews.) However, “Kristallnacht” is prescriptive in that it privileges the image of broken glass and equates it to Jewish violence.

In her essay, Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish women’s responses to daily life in Nazi Germany, Marion Kaplan provides a glimpse into the life, attitudes, and experiences expressed by Jewish women prior and during the early stages of World War II. As Kaplan notes, women’s victimhood in Nazi Germany was different than men’s (155). Female experiences in Nazi Germany during the mid and late 1930s were characterized by social isolation (Bartov, 157). According to Kaplan, “women…took responsibility…for the psychological work necessary to raise their family’s spirits and tide the family over until better times” (Bartov, 158). Further, women’s “narrower-picture” of domestic life alerted them to the dangers at home (Bartov, 161).

Daily life for women in Nazi Germany resonates with their particular experiences during the November Pogroms. In her essay, Kaplan notes the stark differences between male and female testimonies of Kirstallnacht. According to Kaplan, “Jewish women’s memoirs often focus not on broken glass but on flying feathers – feathers covering the internal space of the home” (Bartov 161). Similar to earlier pogroms in Russia, “the mobs tore up feather blankets and pillows and shook them into the rooms,” leaving Jews “bereft of their bedding and the physical and psychological security that it represented” (Bartov, 161). In the looming war economy, items such as bedding could not be replaced. Further, the defilement of the home and its intimacy point to a spiritual rape that forebodes the Jew’s daunting future.

The term “Kristallnacht” is initially unproblematic in that it appears to invoke images of what really happened during the November Pogrom in 1938. However, “Kristallnacht” and its widespread use reflect and privilege a male narrative of the event. Drawing from Peirce’s theory of signs, I am interested in analyzing the semiotic functions of Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass – in contrast to its female counterpart, The Night of Falling Feathers. Drawing from Maggie Hum’s essay Memory, Photography, and Modernism: The “dead bodies and ruined houses” of Virgina Woolf’s ‘Three Guineas’ and Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory, I will argue that gendered memories of traumatic events, such as the November Pogrom of 1938, inform collective memories and cultural representations of the event itself. In exploring the glass feather dyad, my aim is to uncover how different landscapes – such as private, domestic spaces and public areas – create a landscape for memory. Gender, in this case, is a point of entry to uncover historical events and forge an affective relationship to them. In challenging the original male narrative of Kristallnacht, I will examine the weight of female testimonies as a way to remediate our understanding of the Holocaust and counter the spiritual death of women in war.

The Semiotics of Memory: The Night of Broken Glass and the Night of Falling Feathers

1. Pierce’s theory of signs: I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby immediately determined by the former. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
   1. Icons: “a mere community in some quality” (ie likeness) –> physical resemblance between signifier and signified, either visual or sonic (ex: onomatopoeia BANG / BOOM / ZAP)
   2. Symbol: “whose relation to their objects is an imputed character” à purely conventional relationship b/w signifier and signified (ex: the word cat denoting furry, four-legged critter) // conventional, why? the word “cat” doesn’t look or sound like cat → we rely on conventions (ie the English language to find meaning)
   3. Index: “whose relation to their objects consists in a correspondence in fact” –> existential / causal relationship between the signifier and the signified (ex: dark clouds are an index for impending rain, smoke is indexical of fire, personal pronouns are indexical of people, etc)
2. The image of Kristallnacht (broken glass) vis a vis the photographic image: In her essay, The Generation of Post Memory, Marianne Hirsch offers a semiotic breakdown of the photographic image and the impact it has on memory. According to Hirsch, photographs “shape our conception of the events and its transmission” (116). In lieu of Hirsch’s argument, the imagistic properties of the term Kristallnacht operate similarly to a photograph. Kristallnacht is a term that conjures vivid imagery of the pogrom and, for the purpose of this essay, Kristallnacht will be regarded as a historical photograph of sorts. Like photographs, specific terms to describe historical events “survive massive devastation and outlive their subjects and owners” and “function as ghostly revenants of an irretrievably lost past world” (Hirsch 115).
   1. Kristallnacht as index: “the night of broken glass” is contiguous to the object used to represent the event (ie there is a causal link / relationship between broken glass and danger, violence)
   2. Kristallnacht as icon: the image of “Kristallnacht” exhibits a mimetic similarity to the image of crystals and broken glass. Further, Kristallnacht serves as metonymy. Metonymy is a figure of speech that replaces the name of a thing with the name of something else with which it is closely associated (ie the systematic expulsion and violence towards Jewish people as “Kristallnacht” or the night of broken glass). Kristallnacht is iconic in that it serves a metonymic purpose in the collection of memories about World War II and the Holocaust.
   3. Kristallnacht as symbol: Hirsch argues that the combination of a historical image’s inedexical and iconic qualities provide the image with symbolic importance. Kristallnacht, as a symbol, operates similarly as a metaphor. In this case, Kristallnacht “symbolize[s] the sense of family, safety, and continuity that has been hopelessly severed” as a result of anti-Semitic violence (Hirsch 116).

• Gendered criticism of the historical photograph: Memory, Photography. And Modernism: The “dead bodies and ruined houses” of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Three Guineas’ à In her essay, Memory, Photography, and Modernism…, Maggie Humm analyzes the ways in which Virginia Woolf’s scrutinizes photography in Three Guineas. According to Humm, Woolf argues that photography belongs to a repertoire of male physical images that are pervasive in narratives about war. The absence of female images – which Humm calls “invisible images” – provides a single, male-mediated account of war experiences. Kristallnacht, as a historical image, resembles the photographs alluded to in Three Guineas in that both represent and privilege a male narrative about war.
  1. “Visual memories can reveal gendered subjectivity” (Humm, 646)
     1. Humm, like Hirsch, argues that photographic images are “memory fetishes acting as both index and icon” (647). Humm and Woolf perceive photographs as static representations of male experience.
     2. Humm posits that photographs lack the “corporeal affect” that are accounted for in the absent or invisible photographs of female memory (647).

• “The absent photograph functions as a transactional act of memory between narrator and spectator” (Humm 650)

1. Kristallnacht as dominant male ideology about war

1. Interweaving the visual into the verbal: female testimonies of Kristallnacht
   1. Female narratives of Kristallnacht depict falling feathers rather than broken glass
   2. Kristallnacht as a form of historical propaganda à male narrative à prescriptive narrative

• Remediating Kristallnacht as “The Night of Falling Feathers”
  1. Female narrative as “fusing past memory and present feeling” (Humm 652)

1. Obscuring female narratives in Holocaust and war historiography
2. Female memory as trope rather than reality
3. Conclusion

Creative Component

A creative non fiction essay is in the works that fuses the hegemonic visual narrative of broken glass and the less known, but provocative image of falling feathers. It feature a multimedia component and modeled – yet not mimetically replicated – after these recent publications:

http://paidpost.nytimes.com/embassy-of-japan/the-gift-of-cherry-blossoms-honoring-the-friendship-of-two-nations.html?emc=eta1

http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/index.html

Works Cited & Consulted