Restaging Lives
The case studies in this volume indicate that reenactment variously affirms or undermines the dominance of specific historical narratives. They also remind us that experiential history can be scaled in different ways: whether affirmative or challenging, questions of national identity are not infrequently linked to highly personal, often traumatic, experiences.
Especially in restagings of the recent past, reenactment tends to be motivated by autobiographical factors. By reenacting what they or their parents and grandparents experienced, reenactors not only deal with family history. They also reflect on history writ large—the interconnectedness of generations and the questions of guilt, responsibility, and burdens placed on those who come after.As the contributions to this volume show, retracing individual life stories can denote individual (traumatic) experiences, entire phases of life, and even life works. Bill Niven, for example, describes how Jewish refugees evacuated from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 on so-called Kindertransports, and/or their descendants, embark once again on a journey, the destination and outcome of which were uncertain at the time. A more recent past, namely life under Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976-1983), is the focus of Lola Arias’s documentary play My Life After, whose reenactment techniques are explored in Brenda Werth’s chapter. In the play, actors (re)embody onstage their own past lives as well as the lives of their parents. Reenactment emerges as an adaptive process in which individual grief, historical-political context, and the ethics of representation are negotiated in multifaceted ways. Marie Gasper-Hulvat’s study of an autobiographical reenactment in the Soviet Union leads us in a different direction. She describes how the artist Kazimir Malevich restaged his own career in 1928 and 1929 by repainting pictures from his different creative phases for a major retrospective in Moscow.
As Gasper-Hulvat argues, the point of this unusual form of reenactment was not to work through questions of trauma and responsibility in front of an audience but for the artist to recast his own artistic biography within the context of the history of the Russian avant-garde. In this instance, the practice of reenactment can be understood as the reinterpretation not of a single life event but of an entire life’s work or even life’s journey.Comparing such autobiographically motivated reenactments often reveals a notion of “haunting memories,” a topic that is of increasing interest within memory studies, particularly with regard to the examination of Holocaust imaginaries (Dziuban, 2019). What difference does it make when reenactors do not slip into the skin of historical figures but attempt to embody themselves or the lives of their parents? The notion of the body as archive (Haines, 2020) takes on a new, more literal meaning here: where do the scars on our bodies originate, and what function might they serve? Homer already reminds us of how much the traces of a physical injury can be taken as an expression, or even proof, of identity: it is only because of the scar on his leg that Eurycleia can identify a beggar as the returned Odysseus (Odyssey, Book 19). In its intergenerational dimension, then, reenactment extends questions of identity by layering time that transcends the individual’s own lifespan: which scars have we “inherited”? To what extent have the past lives (of others) left traces on our own? In short, what is the relationship between practices of reenactment and what Marianne Hirsch (2012) calls “postmemory”? While Bill Niven in his typologization of reenactment sees the restaged Kindertransports as a form of “postmemorial reenactment,” Brenda Werth emphasizes the ambivalence of the postmemorial paradigm: for her, the physical restaging of parental experiences is not only a tribute to the reenactor’s own mother or father but also the expression of a “subtle resistance to the notion of inheritance of memory.”
The merging of memory practices and body-related truth-finding raises questions about demarcation. Where does biographical self-staging or self-questioning end and reenactment begin? Where exactly does the line run between psychoanalytically motivated, virtual journeys through the individual’s own life and the actual physical returns seen in, for example, the journey of soldiers to “their” former battlefields, “personal memory tourism” (Marschall, 2012), and, say, the Kindertransport reenactments? And what role does one’s own consciousness play in this, the active framing of practice as experiential history? This problem is addressed in Gasper- Hulvat’s contribution: drawing on Malevich’s recreation of his own work in secret, she raises the question as to whether there can be such a thing as “clandestine reenactment” which certain actors make use of in order to deliberately obfuscate historical accuracy.