Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust

6. From Pulp to Palimpsest: Witnessing and Re-Imagining through the Arts

132 6 From Pulp to Palimpsest Witnessing and Re-Imagining Through the Arts Björn Krondorfer in collaboration with Karen Baldner Since the summer of 2002, Karen Baldner and I have been engaged in a collaborative project creating objects about our German and Jewish family histories. We are transforming the cultural messages we have received from our familial and social networks into material representations. As descendants of a persecuted Jewish-German family and a non-persecuted German family, respectively, we have ventured into the haunted spaces left by the legacy of the Shoah and the war. As a Jewish woman and gentile man, we understood early on that rendering ourselves vulnerable in the face of the Other is the most promising way to create a dialogue that would remain true to our quest of accounting for the past without having the past determine our friendship in the present. We collected, assembled, and arranged scraps of memory in response to discomfiting details of family lore and history. A landscape of ruptured lives eventually began to unfold in front of our eyes, and each of us looked at this materialized vista through the lens of our cultural, gendered, and familial dispositions. Because of those differences and because the distance between our residences prevents regular face-to-face encounters, our collaboration seemed an unlikely candidate for success. Yet over the years we have created a small body of work that has received a modicum of public recognition through exhibitions at galleries and museums.1 133 From Pulp to Palimpsest This chapter describes the collaborative process between a woman artist and male scholar that has led to the creation of “material witnesses” (as we like to call our book art installations). We actively transform personal conversations about the fragility of traumatic memory into material objects available for public viewing. In quite literal ways, we mix our dialogue into the wet pulp for papermaking; once pressed and dried, the pulp becomes the parchment onto which we record voices from a fragmented past. Upon further cutting, arranging, layering, printing, lithographing , and framing, parchment turns into a palimpsest of collected, faded, erased, and recombined memories. From pulp to palimpsest: the material level merges with the metaphoric, the personal with the historical, the traumatic with the visionary, the idiosyncratic with the communal. Metonymically, pulp becomes our inherited legacy, parchment resembles our skin, and palimpsest-like installations mirror anxieties that have been inscribed into the biographies and bodies of our families and ourselves. Rupture Karen’s training and profession is that of a visual artist. She comes from a Jewish-German family persecuted during the Nazi era. She grew up in post-Shoah Germany but today resides in Bloomington, Indiana. Art is her life. She knows about the tradition of bookmaking. She knows how to turn pulp into paper, how to print and etch, and how to wrap book covers in fine leather and plain felt. She has the patience to cut, fold, sew, glue, stitch, and press. She has the artist’s courage to discard pieces when they do not satisfy her aesthetic standards. She is familiar with the art history of books and with binding techniques. She knows how to prepare the surface of paper, how to turn iron into rust, how to scratch and corrode mirrors . She knows about lost homes. She knows about the loss of trust and innocence. Between the European World Wars, her maternal grandparents owned one of the largest literary publishing houses in Germany. As assimilated Berlin Jews, they were an integral part of Germany’s cultural life. They published Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Hesse, Alfred Döblin. In 1935, they managed to rescue part of their publishing house from the Nazi encroachment by resettling in Vienna. In 1938, they had to abandon their Austrian apartment overnight and escape to Stockholm. Even Sweden turned out to be an inhospitable place. They fled again, this time to 134 Moscow and from there with the Trans-Siberian Express to Wladiwostok, to Japan, to Santa Monica, to Connecticut. I come from a non-persecuted German family. I grew up in postwar West Germany and now am a religious studies professor at a college in Maryland. I teach, I do research, I write. I have patience with words. I facilitate intercultural encounters between people divided by an antagonistic Fig. 1. Detail of Tikkun/Mending (2006...