“From Anecdotal to Narrative Memory: Dealing with silences and gaps in family memory in Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s writing about wartime rape”

Philosopher Jane Gallop cautions that theorizing based on the anecdotal risks being construed as an “exorbitant” practice, a term she borrows from Derrida precisely in order to justify her work Anecdotal Theory (2002). For Derrida, she argues, the exorbitant is associated with “exteriority, with exits, departures, attempts to get out, and in particular with the attempt to get out of a rut” (p. 8). This paper introduces the concept of “anecdotal memory” as a way to overcome an impasse in the theorization of cultural memory, which tends to oscillate between notions of traumatic silence and narrativity, taboo and speakability. My focus is the memory of wartime rape in post-1945 Germany, where several hundred thousand women were assaulted by Allied soldiers in the final stages of World War II and the early occupation period. As the dust settled, these events were not forgotten; wartime rape found citation in oral histories and political debates, as well as in fiction, film, and widely read memoirs of flight and expulsion from the former Eastern territories. Yet it is clear that this pervasive chatter did not develop into sustained public engagement with the history of wartime rape until the twenty-first century.

My paper begins to develop a theoretical framework capable of explaining this paradox by tracing the shift from what I call “anecdotal” to “narrative” memory using the writings of acclaimed author Hans-Ulrich Treichel. I argue that the tension between the explicit and implicit, knowledge and understanding, intimacy and distance that characterizes “anecdotal memory” is symptomatic of the status of wartime rape in German cultural memory. By showing how anecdotal memory narratives fail to address the subjective and interpersonal legacy of this history, Treichel’s fiction ultimately suggests why the taboo label continues to stick to discussions of wartime rape after 1945.

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