Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akermanis Diest

In the Imaginary Jew, contemporary French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut laments that while his Jewishness furnished him with the deepest, most precious aspects of his identity, on closer examination, it was an identity not conferred on him by his parents but rather one lived through them. ¹ He fears that with their passing, the substance of his Jewish identity will pass too, for it is through their memories and lived knowledge of the customs and languages of the culture that he experienced Jewishness. Having been secularly educated in assimilationist postwar France, he was without direct experience of a larger Jewish community beyond the boundaries of his own home. He realizes with astonishment and a great sense of loss that his parents, Eastern European Holocaust survivors who relocated to France after the war, embodied Yiddishkeit( Jewishness) for him, and with their bodies so would go Yiddishkeit. The bridge between the thriving prewar Jewish culture of Eastern Europe that his parents held dearly in their memories and the postwar Western European context in which he was raised was illusory. He finds himself nostalgic for the victimization experienced by the "real" or "embodied" Jews of his parents' generation. In short, his (imaginary) Jewish identity is located at a generational remove.

Questions of displaced memory and indirect Jewish identity raised by Finkielkraut lie at the core of Chantal Akerman's 1996 film D'Est [From the East] (Belgium/France/Portugal). The Holocaust created a distinct periodization, a traumatic before and after for generations of post-Holocaust Jews that heightens the experience of loss and rupture (cultural, historical) already inherent in the passing of time. The effect for Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent is that "the old country" becomes a sign without referent, an imaginary construct with no actual geographical correlate. Akerman's D'Est approaches this historical chasm in a particularly striking way, attempting as it does to reach across the divide while simultaneously conceding the futility of the gesture. In D'Est, Akerman goes "back" to Eastern Europe, the region in which her parents lived until World War II. This quasi- voyage of return could easily be mistaken for what Akerman herself derisively calls a "'back to my roots' kind of film," except for the fact that in the film she never specifies any personal markers or indicates her investment in the terrain. ² She eschews iconographic Jewish images (no synagogues, no cemeteries, no crematoria) and avoids interviews and narration that might concretize her position. She even bypasses the specific town from which her family came. Akerman seems convinced of the impossibility of finding any meaningful remnants of the past. Her camera glides along the surface of present-day Eastern Europe with an implacable resolve, surveying the prosaic details of life lived in the interstices of bus stops, bread queues, and train station waiting rooms. Yet even in her resolute refusal to penetrate the facade, the very history she seems assiduously to ignore nonetheless protrudes. For her, there seems to be no eluding the imprint of the past—it is written on the impassive faces and spaces she records.

Walter Benjamin wrote that "an image is that in which the Then [das Gewesene] and the Now [das Jetzt] come into constellation like a flash of lightning." ³ It is this constellation that the images of D'Est conjure. Akerman maps images of present-day Eastern Europe onto the memories of a prior time, using the camera as a peripatetic time machine. Time, however, and history more specifically, is not conceived linearly here, but is actually akin to the flashes and ruptures that Benjamin famously proposes. With only a scant nod toward narrativity (the film follows the seasons and the journey from West to East—East Germany to Russia), she privileges the incidental detail over the descriptive, the random over the intentional—a woman listening to her television, another...