Any analysis of reenactment needs to consider two fundamental questions.
The first relates to forms of reenactment.1 How do we define what types of representation classify as reenactment (see Agnew, 2004; Agnew et al., 2020)? The restaging of history can occur in living history museums, on recreated battlefields, in theater plays, musical performances, novels, history books, or works of art—to name but a few genres.
One could argue, then, that wherever history is represented, reenactment takes place. If this definition seems too broad, one could have recourse to a distinction between representation as an (often individual) imaginative exercise which remains bound to the artistic production of historical images (verbal, pictorial, musical) and one in which the past is physically acted out (often by more than one person). There are significant overlaps, however. For instance, as a manuscript, a theater play is an indirect evocation or verbal image of the past, but when it is staged, it is acted out (Johnson, 2020). In historical documentaries, reenactments are designed to bring the past to life, but in the moment they are filmed and integrated into the documentary, they become part of the cycle of artistic production of images of history, offering “a re-interrogation of an event” (Bruzzi, 2020, p. 50). Perhaps a further refinement could be brought to bear, according to which historical reenactment is staged in accordance with a collective and individual agency and not according to a fixed script. Yet this refinement is problematic. The fact that there is a preexisting script—whether written by the reenactors or taken from another source—does not mean that its enactment is not simultaneously a reenactment. Nor would it be tenable to argue that representation in the form of art is governed by greater historical license than representation in the form of, say, a living history museum (Dean, 2020). This might be the case, but it need not be. The past is never reproduced as it was, contrary to the claims to that effect often made by museums, films, novels, and the activities of reenactment groups (Arns, 2020; Muhle, 2020). Asseverations of authenticity, where history is involved, are important for marketing, even if one should be cautious of seeing the authentic as a defining element of reenactment (Agnew and Tomann, 2020, p. 24).A second fundamental question relates to motives for reenactment. Why do we reenact? This question is important because if we identify different
DOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-18On Motives for Reenactment 213 motives, then we can assume that reenactment can serve different purposes—which is not to deny that the effect and the intended purpose do not always match, but to recognize that reenactment is not simply a form of aesthetic expression. The question of motive can only be fully answered in the context of the issues raised above. So, if we classify, say, a television documentary with restagings as a reenacted form, then we have to take the motives of such documentaries into account. But for the moment, and for the purpose of this case study, let us assume that the essential or primary character of reenactment is the act of physical re-presentation of a historical event by one or more groups. When people get together and decide to reenact an event, they are, perhaps, doing more than restaging. It could be argued that, while actors in a play take on roles, reenactors become those roles, indeed, they seek a form of identification that goes further than good method acting (Roselt and Otto, 2012). Reenactors may be terrible actors— sometimes, at least—but good reenactors in the sense that they fulfill the subjective impulse to become someone else, even as this effort may or may not appear particularly convincing in an objective sense. Embodiment, then, is an important motive behind reenactment (Card, 2020; Johnson, 2015). By contrast, novelists rarely seek to become the figures they represent in their works, at least not at the cost of the differentiation required to retain artistic control, and readers cannot identify with a novel’s characters in quite the way they can if they seem to become historical figures themselves.
In fact, it could be that embodiment is the principal motive behind reenactment— to get under the skin of historical figures as a point of entry into historical experience. The question then poses itself as to why we should wish to achieve such a form of embodiment.In the following, I propose some possible motives for reenactment by exploring contemporary Kindertransport reenactments, which will illustrate the range of such motives and demonstrate how they might interact.2 The Kindertransport entailed the rescue of some 10,000 children, mainly Jewish, from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. It represented a direct response to the increased persecution of and violence against German Jews following Reich Pogrom Night in November 1938. The transports were organized on the British side by the Refugee Children’s Movement and on the German side by the Reich Association of Jews in Germany (for a history of the Kindertransport, see Fast, 2011). The majority of these children were brought to Britain by train and boat. Many of them went on to become British citizens and still live in Britain today. Recent reenactments of the Kindertransport formed part of the enormous commemorative activity around the 70th, 75th, and 80th anniversaries of the event. Thus, in September 2009, a train set off from Prague to reenact the journeys undertaken by the 690 Jewish children rescued from Czechoslovakia in 1939 (Figure 14.1). The trip was organized by the “Train Prague - London” project, sponsored by the Czech government with British support, in honor of Sir Nicholas Winton, who organized the 1939 Czech transports.
Figure 14.1 Former Kindertransportees participating in the 2009 Prague-London Winton Train Ride.
Source: © Barbara Winton.
Winton himself welcomed the train at Liverpool Street Station (Hasson and Lahav, 2009). As such, the first motive we can identify here is commemorative (and often anniversarial) reenactment, a motive informing much contemporary historical reenactment—one just needs to think, for instance, of the flotilla of small ships that set sail for Dunkirk in 2015 to mark the 75th anniversary of the evacuation from France in 1940 (Ratcliffe, 2015).
In fact, commemorative impulses characterize most of the Kindertransport reenactments discussed here: people come together to remember. Added to these impulses, however, are other motivational factors.More research needs to be done into the gradual evolution of commemoration from a purely contemplative activity, marked by collective retrospection in a spirit of remembrance (often around a memorial), to one that is (part-)performed through reenactment (on commemorative reenactment, see Tomann, 2020). According to Jan Assmann, communicative memory of an event—in other words, its transmission through everyday communication— comes to an end after about 80 years (2008, p. 111). Subsequently, cultural memory—the transmission of history through cultural representations such as films and museums—takes over. Could it be that, precisely at the moment where World War II appears to be passing from communicative to cultural
Figure 14.2 Former Kindertransportees participating in the 2009 Prague-London Winton Train Ride.
Source: © Barbara Winton.
memory, new generations without a lived family connection to the war are seeking to create their own lived connection through reenactment? If reenactment can generate an (approximate or indirect) reexperiencing of the past, communicative memory—the passing down of experience—can continue. Today, commemoration’s appeal can no longer rely on the evocation of collective values supposedly rooted in the past: now, even more, it depends on the best available experiential approximation to that past.
For those who do have a real lived connection to a historical event, however, commemorative reenactment can have a different function. Of the 170 passengers who took part in the September 2009 Prague-London train ride, 22 had been rescued by Winton; they are known as “Winton’s children” (Figure 14.2 and 14.3). Second- or third-generation descendants of “Winton’s children” were also on board, accompanied by diplomats and members of the public (Hasson and Lahav, 2009).
It was Sigmund Freud (1924) who developed the concept of “repetition compulsion” (“Wiederholungszwang”) to designate the involuntary acting out, among other things, of a repressed past.
The now well-established term “traumatic reenactment” captures this notion. Yet Freud also believed that, under the influence of psychotherapy, reenactment could help to overcome
Figure 14.3 Locomotive 60163 Tornado with the Winton Train at London Liverpool Street Station.
Source: Photographed by SP Smiler, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/FileWinton-Train-London- Liverpool-St-Stn-20090904a.jpg).
the trauma. In this connection, Michael S. Levy has written of an adaptive process where victims “more actively reenact a traumatic situation from their past” (1998, p. 228) in an attempt to achieve some kind of resolution. For “Winton’s children,” the 2009 commemorative train journey in carriages from the 1930s simultaneously represented the possibility of what I would term an adaptive reenactment: a chance, decades later, to confront and perhaps come to terms with the traumatic childhood experience of separation from their parents (on trauma and reenactment, see Mocnik, 2020). Thus Thomas Graumann, a Winton child, recalled that reenacting his original 1939 journey in 2009 had helped him understand the mixed legacy of rescue: “as we ended our trip, the joy of being rescued was mixed with the ache for those who weren’t” (Graumann, 2019, Kindle Loc 2625).
Also on that same train were 218 relatives of the children saved by Winton (Miskin, 2018). Similarly, in 2018, descendants of Jews who arrived on the Kindertransport took part in a commemorative cycle ride from Berlin to Harwich. The ride was organized by World Jewish Relief, a charity which, in its previous iteration as the Central British Fund for German Jewry, was involved in the organization of the Kindertransport (World Jewish Relief,On Motives for Reenactment 277 2018). In one case, Paul Alexander, who had been sent on a Kindertransport to Britain at the age of one in 1939, was accompanied by his son and grandson (Sherwood, 2018).
Here we are dealing, potentially, with a postmemorial reenactment. Marianne Hirsch distinguishes what she defines as postmemory from Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory”: while rememory is “a memory that, communicated through bodily symptoms, becomes a form of repetition and reenactment,” postmemory “works through indirection and multiple mediation” (2012, pp. 82-83). In Hirsch’s understanding, rememory, as posited by Morrison, occurs when the children of Holocaust survivors, for instance, transpose themselves into the past in such a way that they lose all sense of themselves. Postmemory, by contrast, “[opens] up the possibility of a form of second-generation remembrance that is based on a more consciously and necessarily mediated form of identification” (Hirsch, 2012, p. 85). A historical reenactment of the kind under consideration here, though, need not represent a rememory in Morrison’s sense but rather a postmemorial experience as understood by Hirsch. For the Berlin- Harwich reenactment was not entirely an act of repetition. After all, the children, in 1938, did not travel on 21st-century bicycles. The reenactment was, at one level, metaphorical, while at another it constituted a sporting activity designed as a gesture of thanks to those who rescued the Kinder. Overall, of course, it was a media event. The children and other relatives of Kindertransportees could thus reenact the original journey, but in a manner and with a purpose which prevented them from slipping completely into a past that was not their own. “Indirection” (Hirsch, 2012) potentially opened up a space for them to process the experience consciously, working through any psychological legacies deriving from a trauma in their family history.An interesting facet of the Berlin-Harwich cycle ride was that it used Kindertransport memorials—all by the Israeli sculptor and former Kindertransportee Frank Meisler—as staging posts: the journey began at the Berlin Friedrichstrasse memorial, passed by the memorial at the Hook of Holland, and ended at London’s Liverpool Street memorial. This alone must have served to remind the participants of one key purpose: to honor the memory of the children, a process which discourages absolute identification, as one cannot honor a person by becoming that person—the subject position as the one “honoring” needs to be maintained.
There have been other examples of connections between Kindertransport memorials and reenactment. In 2008, the “street theater” production Suitcase began its tour of British stations. Suitcase was devised by theater academic and practitioner Ros Merkin and produced by Hope Street Limited, which presents cross-artform performances in non-theater spaces (Suitcase, 2013b). The production acted out scenes from the Kindertransport to audiences who had bought tickets but also to sometimes bemused passersby. Notwithstanding the fact that all forms of reenactment are in some respect performative, Suitcase was a performative reenactment in the stricter sense: for here were (in part) professional actors whose express wishwas to communicate their roles and text to an audience, to interact. The production used busy stations to lend actuality to its depiction of arriving children. Suitcase, according to its website, “was created as the place where the past and present collide” (Suitcase, 2013a). This was certainly true at Liverpool Street Station when parts of the play were performed at Meisler’s memorial. For a moment, the events the memorial recalled unfolded dramatically around it in another of those mixtures of experiencing and remembering that is the hallmark of reenactment. Viewers were even drawn into the action. Cultural critic and art historian Dora Apel coined the term “counter-memory reenactment” to designate forms of reenactment whose overall message critiques that of official commemoration (2013, p. 254). But there also exists what one might call a reanimating reenactment, which does not so much critique official commemoration or sites of official commemoration as seek to shake the dust off them. History is rendered contemporaneous, which in turn infuses commemoration with relevance, not least because such renderings invite comparison to present-day issues.
Reenactment is not the only form of artistic expression which can reanimate in this way. In 2017, Wrap Up London, a campaign run by the registered charity Hands on London and supported by World Jewish Relief and the Association of Jewish Refugees, placed “bright red coats on the iconic Kindertransport statue at Liverpool Street Station, to help encourage Londoners to donate their old coats to those in need” (Association of Jewish Refugees, 2017). In large measure, the campaign was designed to help refugee children. The physical “re-dressing” of memorial statues spelled out the message: these figures were, for a while, turned into representations of present-day needs rather than past sufferings. If this rearticulation seemed rather blunt and unsubtle, the methods used by Germany’s Center for Political Beauty (CPB) in evoking the Kindertransport were a little short of drastic. The CPB was formed by a group of artists and is motivated in its public art actions by concern “that the legacy of the Holocaust is rendered void by political apathy, the rejection of refugees and cowardice. It believes that Germany should not only learn from its History (sic) but also take action” (Center for Political Beauty, 2019). In the spirit of this mission statement, but a few meters away from Frank Meisler’s Berlin Kindertransport memorial at Friedrichstrasse (Figure 14.4), the Center set up a container asking passersby to select one out of 100 Syrian refugee children for rescue to Germany; the others, it was implied, would be doomed to their fate in Syria (Timm, 2014). In a sense, this was a kind of enactment, if not reenactment, and designed to expose the futility of memorials such as Meisler’s if the message they convey is not acted on in the present. The Center was not critiquing the memorial per se, so much as the fact that it remained inert if not responded to.
Kindertransport reenactments, however, can encourage associations in less explicit ways. In acting out the past in the present, they hold up a mirror in which the present is inevitably reflected. This was the case with
Figure 14.4 Frank Meisler Kindertransport Memorial at Berlin Friedrichstrasse (“Trains to Life—Trains to Death”).
Source: © Bill Niven.
Suitcase, and it was also the case when to commemorate the arrival of the first Kindertransport in Harwich on 2 December 1938, schoolchildren took part in a reenactment 80 years later: “To mark the 80th anniversary of the evacuation, children of different ages wore newsboy hats, Tweed coats and vintage shoes to get in character as evacuees who made the voyage from mainland Europe to Harwich” (Harwich and Manningtree Standard, 2018). It would be surprising if those who looked on as the children made their way by train from Harwich to Liverpool Street Station in London had not made the connection to the present-day refugee crisis, especially as former Kindertransportee and Labour politician Lord Dubs has vigorously been campaigning—to much media coverage—for the government to bring in children, particularly unaccompanied children, from Syria. In 2016, Dubs succeeded in bringing in an amendment—the so-called “Dubs Amendment”—to Britain’s Immigration Act in order to help unaccompanied refugees reach British shores. To date, the amendment has not had the desired effect, but Dubs continues to campaign (Townsend, 2018). Not surprisingly, he regards the Kindertransport as a precedent which the government, in some form or other, needs to follow.
The Harwich reenactment of 2018 was an educational reenactment in several senses. It was educational for the audiences with whom the children engaged—at Liverpool Street Station, for instance, where they approached members of the public and handed out postcards urging reflection on the history of the transports. Taking part in the reenactment was also educational, as the schoolchildren participated in it as part of the process of learning about the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, the reenactment preparations enabled the schoolchildren to receive acting lessons (Harwich and Manningtree Standard, 2018). But they were not just acting out a play or any old history. The participating schoolchildren attended schools local to Harwich, and the reenactment was also specifically designed to help them engage more with the history of the area: the commemorative event was financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund as part of a project whose purpose is to encourage residents to remember their heritage (Harwich Haven, 2020). The schoolchildren took on the identities of children before them, bridging a historical, generational, and experiential gap and strengthening, ideally, their sense of affiliation with their localities. There is a poignant irony in the fact that the children they were imaginatively embodying had come as strangers and outcasts yet were being perceived in retrospect as interwoven with the history of their point of entry to the extent that that history had become unthinkable without them; they had become, even as they arrived, part of the host nation’s heritage. Yet the schoolchildren were also invited to imagine themselves into the mentalities of these outcasts, of those “othered” by Nazi Germany, and thus also invited to imagine the Kindertransportees' sense of isolation and abandonment. Quite how the schools involved in the reenactments handled this tension—the Kindertransportees as both heritage and outcasts—is not addressed in the few newspaper reports.
Finally, what do we make of the event organized by the Association of Jewish Refugees at Speaker’s House in Parliament on 21 November 2018, where a number of parliamentarians read out extracts from the debate in the House of Commons on 21 November 1938 over whether or not to allow 10,000 Jewish and “non-Aryan” children into Britain—a debate which paved the way for the Kindertransport (Association of Jewish Refugees, 2018)? This could certainly be described as a political reenactment in a double sense. Firstly, a historical parliamentary debate was restaged; secondly, its function was political. That became particularly clear on 26 November 2018 when Lord Dubs, who had read from his testimony during the reenactment event, tabled a question for a short debate in the House of Lords. Dubs asked the government what plans they had to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport. Introducing the debate, Dubs focused almost entirely onOn Motives for Reenactment 281 the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis and the government’s failure to bring in more than 280 unaccompanied children, not even meeting its own modest target of 480 (TheyWorkForYou, 2018). Subsequent discussion among the Lords turned around this question of taking in today’s refugees. The reenactment event in the House of Commons, and this Lords’ debate, made of the 21 November 1938 parliamentary debate a rallying call in the present. Political reenactments can thereby be invocatory reenactments (Agnew and Konuk, 2020, on the related concept of “intercessory witnessing”). In this case, the words of the 1938 debate, in their restating, took on the quality of an incantation: “let history happen again” was the implicit mantra. (To date, though, the government has not allowed itself to be charmed into accepting more unaccompanied minors fleeing Syria.) When reenactments aim to stimulate similar actions or reactions in the present to those being portrayed in the reenactment, they take on an associative quality. In analogy to Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory, according to which memory of the Holocaust and of other historical injustices can collaborate rather than compete (Rothberg, 2009, pp. 3-4), we might speak of multidirectional reenactment. In remembering the Kindertransport, we recall the fate of refugees desperate to reach Europe over the last five to ten years. Empathy can be transferred from the past to the present and the other way round.
The examples explored here of Kindertransport reenactment show that motives for reenactment can be various. Certainly, as stated earlier, these examples can all be subsumed under the rubric of commemoration—or better, living commemoration, in which the mind and spirit do not so much hold the past at contemplative distance as they seek to experience its reality and create a personal relationship to cultural heritage which suffuses it with immediacy and relevance. One might also say that the reenactments cited here have multiple purposes. Thus, the action staged by the CPB near Meisler’s Kindertransport memorial was not just designed to stir the consciences of passersby through breathing relevance into Meisler’s memorial, it also had a clearly political intention aimed at changing government policy. The CPB pretended that Germany’s Family Ministry had started a program designed to bring in 55,000 Syrian child refugees (Center for Political Beauty, 2014; Hollstein and Kogel, 2014). The pretense projected a desired reality as real in the hope that Germany’s Family Ministry would respond support- ively. Reenactments can simultaneously be adaptive, educational, and political. Several of the examples provided also have a fundraising function so that we could speak of caritative reenactment: for instance, the 2018 bike ride from Germany to England discussed above was also designed to encourage donations to World Jewish Relief in its efforts to battle the effects of poverty around the world (PA, 2018). Separating out these cases into categories according to a single main motive risks overlooking these areas of overlap. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that, in each of the cases considered above, a particular motive stood out, making it possible to visualize that motive. The brief typology provided here has another limit: it draws attention to somegeneral reasons why people reenact, but it reveals little about how reenactment is perceived and responded to on the part of participants and audiences. Knowing more about this would be a desideratum, not least because intention and reception can go in quite different directions. It would also be important to address the specific group or institutional motives of those who organized the reenactments—Jewish organizations, local communities, theater groups, charities—and a more detailed survey of motive would clearly have to look at these. My approach here has simply been to look for lines, tendencies, within the reenactments themselves. What is certainly true of all those involved in the activities discussed is that they wished to engage in a novel and striking way with a key element of British heritage and render it, as the Germans say, “aktuell”—as important today as it was at the time. These reenactors sought to inhabit heritage and to accommodate audiences within it.