In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Jeanette Clausen Broken but not Silent: Language as Experience in Vera Kamenko's Unter uns war Krieg'1' "Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult -to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language -this will become not merely unspoken, but unspeakable."! The word "unspeakable" may imply one or more of several meanings: (1) that a thing or event is beyond description, inexpressible; (2) that it is inexpressibly bad or objectionable-, (3) that is is not to be spoken. As I understand Adrienne Rich's statement that the unspoken becomes unspeakable, it encompasses the whole range of meanings -- impossibility (first meaning), condemnation or censure (second meaning), and prohibition (third meaning). Thus, to begin to "speak the unspeakable" is to do what is impossible because the words to describe it either do not exist or their use is prohibited (or both?) as well as to make oneself a target for censure. Most fundamentally, then, speaking the unspeakable requires claiming or creating the language with which to do so. Vera Kamenko's Unter uns war Krieg,2 the life story of a Yugoslavian worker in Berlin, is an unusual and important book which exemplifies "speaking the unspeakable" in both content and form. Vera relates events leading up to the day she beat her sevenyear -old son severely; the following day he had to be hospitalized and subsequently died. She wrote while in prison, not in her native language but in German. As published, the book is the result of collaboration between Vera and the editor, Marianne Herzog. It consists of Vera's autobiographical narrative (pp.8-82) plus a few pages of diary entries (pp. 85-98), Marianne 's foreword (pp.6-7) and a two-part afterword (pp. 99-111). The title is taken from Vera's description of the day the beating took place. In approaching this book, we as readers must con115 front many issues, often unspoken, that are basic to feminism: the intersection of multiple oppressions -based on gender, race or ethnicity, and class -- and the specificity of those oppressions; institutionalized violence and the use or threat of violence as a means of control; the role of language in an ideology that excludes so-called minorities from full personhood . I have come to see language not only as a tool, a means for describing and ordering the world and our experiences in it, but also as a continually recurring event in our lives, something that happens to us or is done to us as well as something we use and can control. The issue of class is especially important here, for as (relatively) privileged women, we have access to and control over language in a way that a woman like Vera Kamenko does not. Thus, another question for us becomes: how do we react to Vera's "broken German"? That is, how does it affect our (potential) relationship to the speaker/writer; does it interfere with or otherwise affect our ability to understand and value her experiences and relate them to our own? Before discussing these issues , it is first necessary to summarize Vera's story. Vera's Story: Doing the Impossible "Seid Realisten, verlangt das Unmögliche !"4 "I don't believe that idealism is the primary force that moves people. Necessity moves people."5 The Utopian challenge to "demand the impossible" implies that the only realistic hope for radically changing society lies in doing what is generally believed to be impossible. However, I propose that we also think of this imperative statement in terms of the reality of Vera Kamenko's life, which stands for the lives of many other women who will never get a chance to speak. The Utopian demand takes on another dimension when we confront lives that we would probably consider "unlivable," when we remember that millions of such "impossible" lives are being lived every day, through necessity. Vera Kamenko (b. 1947) tells her life story more or less chronologically, beginning with her childhood in a small Yugoslavian village. She was the only child...

pdf