Dean of the College, Division of Languages and Literature, and German Studies Program Present

Invisible Archives: The Prisoner’s Testimony

Drawing on and expanding Jacques Derrida’s notion of the archive as a site that negotiates the relationship between memory and forgetting, this lecture focuses on testimonies that resist to appear in any given site or space of commemoration. How can we imagine and secure memory and political responsibility if the testimony is unavailable, absent, or unreliable? What happens if an archive no longer follows the archontic principle that is invested in the preservation and even the constitution of an event?

Within literary renderings of imprisonment a powerful mode of testimony can unfold: Emmy Hennings’ autobiographical novel Prison (1918), written during World War I as her contribution to the Dada movement, and Werner Krauss’ novel PLN—The Passions of the Halyconian Soul (1946), written while the Romance scholar was on death row in a Gestapo prison and as a secret addendum to his official study on Baltasar Gracián, are exemplary texts that are fixated on and even obsessed with language. Caught between confession, resistance, transformation, and survival, the prisoner’s testimony brings forth an invisible archive by means of language as a mode of probability, not principality, that reconfigures the relation between history, politics, and fiction.

Nicola Behrmann is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Her research combines studies of literature, history, and gender and media studies. Within this framework, Behrmann focuses on 20^th-century avant-garde movements and works on the politics of the archive and on non-representational forms of memory in literary, visual, and architectural spaces. She is author of the book Geburt der Avantgarde—Emmy Hennings (2018) and co-editor of several volumes of an annotated edition of the works of Emmy Hennings (2016-2020). Currently, Behrmann is working on a book-length study of four women writers in 1920s’ Germany, titled “The Mystical Archive”.

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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