The Historical Uncanny
Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory
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The Historical Uncanny explores how certain memories become inscribed into the heritage of a country or region while others are suppressed or forgotten. In response to the erasure of historical memories that discomfit a public’s self-understanding, this book proposes the historical uncanny as that which resists reification precisely because it cannot be assimilated to dominant discourses of commemoration.
Focusing on the problems of representation and reception, the book explores memorials for two marginalized aspects of Holocaust: the Nazi euthanasia program directed against the mentally ill and disabled and the Fascist persecution of Slovenes, Croats, and Jews in and around Trieste. Reading these memorials together with literary and artistic texts, Knittel redefines “sites of memory” as assemblages of cultural artifacts and discourses that accumulate over time; they emerge as a physical and a cultural space that is continually redefined, rewritten, and re-presented.
In bringing perspectives from disability studies and postcolonialism to the question of memory, Knittel unsettles our understanding of the Holocaust and its place in the culture of contemporary Europe.
…an ambitious and highly engaging work.
'The Historical Uncanny' draws on literary, artistic, and other realms in a study of memorials for the Nazi euthanasia program against the mentally ill and disabled, and for the persecution of Jews, Croats, and Slovenes in and near Trieste.---—The Chronicle of Higher Education
Susanne Knittel’s study of 'disability, ethnicity, and the politics of Holocaust memory' is an extraordinarily original addition to the contemporary literature of Holocaust memory studies. In her focus on previously under-examined sites of memory (such as those commemorating the Nazis’ mass-murder of the disabled) and under-studied dimensions of the Holocaust (such as perpetrators 'from Grafeneck to the Risiera'), Knittel’s work not only expands the field but exemplifies the best, most profound new work in Holocaust memory studies I have seen in the last several years. It is absolutely essential reading.
The Historical Uncanny starts with the fact that it was the same group of German men who organized, supervised, and carried out the killing of the mentally ill and disabled in Grafeneck in 1940 and the deportation and killing of Jews and partisans at the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste in 1943. The multi-directionality of perpetrator history on the killing fields across Europe generates new insights into the neglected links between eugenics, the Holocaust, and the role of Italian colonialism toward Slovenians and Croats. Past and present of two seemingly very different sites are woven together in illuminating readings of archival research, memorial sites and practices, exhibitions, television series, and literary texts. An exceptionally rich study in perpetrator history and nationally distinct memory politics in today’s Europe.
The Historical Uncanny is a compelling and highly original study of two interlinked, 'asymmetrical' sites of European history and memory: Grafeneck and Trieste, Germany and Italy, disability and race, euthanasia, ethnic persecution and genocide. Knittel builds on and challenges some of the most important recent insights into Holocaust memory, weaving around her two case studies a fascinating web of 'multidirectional' connections, biographical, spatial, representational and conceptual.
Susanne Knittel's book is beautifully written and original. It will inspire a necessary and overdue dialogue between Holocaust studies, memory studies, and disability studies.