The Semiotics of Memory
The Semiotics of Memory and Remembering Kristallnacht
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.
Link to my critical component:
Rethinking Historical Narratives: A Creative Component
My creative component for this project is a short, creative non fiction essay in which I re-imagine Kristallnacht as The Night of Fallen Feathers. My narrative is situated in Berlin, during a study trip I went on over Spring Break. In this creative piece, I embody the memory voyeur – trying to understand the past in different ways, trying to fill the generational gap with affect, images, and sound. The feathers and glass images are illustrated by dear a friend, Alvaro Azcárraga – a Studio Art major from the University of California at Berkeley.
Link to my creative component
Hi Vita,
I was blown away by your project! Your creative component was vibrant and thought-provoking, and as I read your writing I felt like I was sharing that experience with you. I think you did a great job imagining what that night was like for women, and I think you conveyed those ideas beautifully to the reader. I also enjoyed how thorough your critical component was. You incorporated so many voices and touched on multiple theories, and that gave a lot of legitimacy to your work.
When reading your project, I received the idea that society filters history to only represent the male experience, and neglects to incorporate the women’s voice. In addition, I learned that Kristallnacht can be viewed as a gendered symbol, and that gendered symbols can obscure part of the history.
Do you think we should relabel the event “The Night of Falling Feathers,” or should we broaden our conceptions of a dynamic event and avoid falling into traps of thinking? Does labeling historical events intrinsically obscure part of the narrative?
I really enjoyed your project!
Hey!
Your project looks amazing. I really like how you formatted your creative piece with the images breaking up the text. I think both were beautiful and complimented one another. I also think your critical component was engaging and informative. It’s obvious that you put a lot of work into this project and took it in a new direction that we did not cover in class, but makes really good use of some concepts we touched on.
It is an interesting idea to look at one word that has so much history behind it. The exploration of that word in the context of history and symbolism is a great application of word-image theory and adds a lot to the conversation. I think your project is really important in examining how we think about history and our collective memories. It shows how valuable it can be to question assumptions and identify the frame through which history is presented.
Great job!
Hey Vita,
Both as a history major and a wordart peer, I find your project fascinating. It not only taught me about an event I knew nothing about, it also helped me begin to start thinking about how collective and historical memory can be gendered and how our own identities and biases nuance memory of the past just as they do our engagement with the present. Your creative piece embodied some of the symbolic and gendered principles you discussed in your critical piece and allowed me more of a first hand, rather than a detached-academic, experience of the events. I thought the images you chose for your creative piece were really effective and I liked how you ordered them cyclically. Where you placed them was also effective because having the images to meditate on not only enhanced the experience, it also gave me time to process the text. In our workshop time we had talked a little about what our stretch goals for digital pieces would be, if we were all master coders etc. Though your creative piece doesn’t have the dynamic, moving parts you might have wanted in an ideal world, I don’t think your piece lost anything by embodying the form it took.
This is a remarkable, original, and profound work of scholarly investigation and personal reflection. Your essay does a marvelous job synthesizing the work of a variety of historians of the Holocaust and theorists of semiotics and memory. I agree with Ela about how the creative piece helps visualize the gendered dynamics and would add that it also highlights the function of memory as a creative faculty.
I hope you’ll continue to develop this important work. I think you can expand your discussion of the gendered nature of historical memory by considering the intimate, domestic associations of feathers, in contrast to the more public, commercial associations of broken store windows. I also think the work could be enriched by the inclusion of primary sources, such as the widely available photographs of the broken glass and store fronts, as well as the much less accessible voices of the women who recollected the trauma in terms of bed feathers falling. But perhaps you meant to keep their voices out of the critical and creative essays as a way of drawing attention to their silencing. If this is the case, you might discuss that justification.
The personal reflection is haunting and immediate, and the cycle of images is stunning. Like Lauren, I felt like I was there on the street, sharing the experience with you. But I wonder if I would feel the connection as strongly if I didn’t know that you had just been in Berlin on a Holocaust studies trip. You might make your work accessible by providing a bit more context, for example, explaining what “stolperstein” means to those unfamiliar with the term.