Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Conversation >

Culture after Auschwitz. I'm screwed screwed screwed.

Tryphena Absent

13:53 / 09.12.02

So I just got to go and make an appointment with the head of my department. Sometime this week I get to pour out my whole family history and the psych of my relationship with my mummy to a near complete stranger so that she'll understand why I haven't been able to do any work for the last three weeks. Fun.

I knew I shouldn't do this module, the holocaust isn't a good subject for me, I thought that I'd just be angry but whatdyaknow I actually have a complete block stopping me from writing about it. It brings up this weird desparate hysteria in my personality that I knew I had, I just didn't realise how connected it was to my mother and her parents. So all the words in my head have become confused, apparently I can't even read about Heidegger coherently never mind Adorno, everything is completely confused and now I have to explain why it's not going to happen.

My question is how do you stop from bursting in to tears when you're trying to explain something so absurd and personal? Also should I even be asking her why she's allowing a course to run that is so weirdly geared towards individuals? God this makes me feel like a freak.

Goodness Gracious Meme

14:04 / 09.12.02

Is it a bad thing if you *do* burst into tears? on a purely pragmatic level, it'd convince your tutor that this is a really difficult issue for you. And why should you try and hide how you feel? In terms of getting what you want - what *do* you want?

If you really do want to minimise the likelihood of teariness, *be prepared*. Treat it like an interview/exam - prepare what you're going to say, and pre-empt questions you're likely to be asked. Or, imagine it's someone else; what sort of things would you tell them to do/say.

And make sure you've set up something good to do afterwards. Get a friend to be in a bar round the corner so you know you've got somewhere to go. Get food/beer/drugs/friends around.. whateer makes you feel good, set this up in advance so there's something to catch you.

(I sympathise, I've got a ten-page questionnaire to fill in before i can get a pyschotherapy assessment. Lots of nice neat boxes to answer questions like: what are your issues? tell us about your mother...etc... The above is how I'm trying to deal...)

14:08 / 09.12.02

Your abstract is a much clearer question than those in the actual post -- I'm not sure how to answer these last two questions:
My question is how do you stop from bursting in to tears when you're trying to explain something so absurd and personal? Also should I even be asking her why she's allowing a course to run that is so weirdly geared towards individuals?

What does that last one mean?

On the one before it, though....
People burst into tears all the time when discussing family histories and the holocaust. I get all twingey myself (even though technically, my grandfather wasn't part of the Final Solution, just... institutionalized at the wrong time).
There's nothing wrong with that. That's kind of what makes it the Shoah.

On this one, though: How the hell does someone with a family like mine deal with the intellectualisation -is that a word- of Auschwitz?
I'm not sure how else to deal with these things OTHER than by intellectualizing them. I come to grips with things by thinking them through, myself.

In general, you might find this site and this site useful, even if only for getting some of the language down to explain yourself to yourself as well as your advisor. The way you're feeling, it's far from unheard of.

That is, if I'm reading this correctly. If not, lemme know.

Tryphena Absent

14:32 / 09.12.02

Thanks grant that's really really helpful. Actually I think I might have to show this site to my parents - my grandparents weren't Jewish actually they were Catholics but my grandmother had a very difficult time and was sent halfway round the world and got meningitis and then they were part of the exiled Polish community and ... I don't think it's significant actually except that once you get to my generation it has pretty much the same effect whatever happened. I'm just trying to cope with being second generation English after my grandparents emigrated to this country as refugees after a traumatic event. It's fine and normal until I have to read a load of books and try to write a coherent essay about it while dealing with a parent inhibiting me and contemplating my granny who was clinically depressed for over forty years.

Goodness Gracious Meme

14:41 / 09.12.02

I don't think it's significant actually except that once you get to my generation it has pretty much the same effect whatever happened.

I think you've put your finger on somemthing very important here. And is something I think alot of 2nd/3rd gen. immigrants share. I get incredibly twingey (great word) talking anything to do with colonialist history/borders/boundaries/expulsions (family on both sides lost estates/livelihoods/family members during Partition) And you've explained yourself very clearly here and below:

I'm just trying to cope with being second generation English after my grandparents emigrated to this country as refugees after a traumatic event. It's fine and normal until I have to read a load of books and try to write a coherent essay about it while dealing with a parent inhibiting me and contemplating my granny who was clinically depressed for over forty years.

So perhaps you could make stuff from this thread, where you *are* investigating this, and receiving other slants, a part of figuring out what you're going to say. Use what you've got here, as what you've said above makes it pretty clear *why* this stuff is tough for you. That's a hell of a lot to be taking on every time you try and write/read something.

Good luck, hon.

Tryphena Absent

14:42 / 09.12.02

Thanks I feel clearer now you've said that.

14:43 / 09.12.02

Similar situation here, only my grandmother was made of iron or something. My German family were Catholics as well, and landowners. I could easily have been right where you are, actually - Granny sheltered with nuns who ran a carnation farm in England. To this day, my mother and uncles really dislike the smell of carnations....

If you don't mind talking about it a little more, I'm curious: is the problem more dredging through the emotional aftermath en route to composing a coherent paper, or more that your personal and family experiences just don't fit the analytical framework you're trying to/required to use?

14:45 / 09.12.02

Uh, pretend I finished writing that before bengali slipped in.

Ex

14:48 / 09.12.02

If your tutors are at all useful (I have my fingers crossed) they will be aware of how class issues can im[act on individual students. This can be the case for race, gender, sexuality topics; and a host of other things that crop up in history, literature, politics. Particularly because the people who are most interested (in both senses - curious and invested) will often have personal reasons for their interest.
If you will forgive a little personal waffling, your proximity to the subject (although, clearly a fucker at present) isn't bad in itself. Although it's painful, it means that the things you're hoping to study will have some relevance to your life, and that's a rare thing; many people feel utterly dissassociated from what they're studying.
It's often suggested that "critical distance" is the best way to approach learning. Proximity and immersion are traditionally denigrated in favour of distance and coolness. You can shoot this down [at least a little] from many angles (particularly when it excludes categories of people from discussing their own position because they're "too close" to the situation).
I don't suppose that's comforting, and it doesn't suggest any way of negotiating the gritty details. But your tutor will have had at least a couple of students every year utterly freaked out by the content of this (in particular) and other courses, and should be very used to it. Best of luck.

Tryphena Absent

14:52 / 09.12.02

Oh in most cases it might be good to have some personal interest, I'm not debating that, but this is effecting everything I do. I haven't written a single word of any of my assessed work for three weeks now and I'm getting depressed, majorly depressed, this is a gate that does not need to be opened right now especially when it's coupled with that whole third year anxiety thing.

14:59 / 09.12.02

Just to add my good wishes/ wishes for strength, really, Janina.

Ex

15:00 / 09.12.02

Sorry - sucks. I didn't mean to be overly Yoda. Obviously personal involvement stops being of any use when you can't - well - use it.
Does your institution have any approachable types with whom you could hack through some of your concerns in detail? I'm thinking the course tutor if zie's pleasant, or a student advisor?
Is there any chance of coming at this issue through the course? As I understand, there's an element in holocaust studies of querying how and why why can study/intellectualise it.
As a last ditch, do you think you would be able to withdraw somewhat and steer yourself round the rudiments of the course without having to engage too thoroughly? Although that last might be impossible, and/or unadvisable...

Tryphena Absent

15:14 / 09.12.02

Everyone needs a Yoda! I'm going to speak to the woman who was the course leader, she has a slight background in psychoanalysis and was once a raging feminist, there's no one else who I could really begin to approach this with in the department so it'll have to be her.

I've come to the conclusion that this is unapproachable for me. I can't write the first sentence, what comes out is this gook, something lame or a criticism of the course. All the things I shouldn't be writing and my lecturer made it worse because he tried to get me to take Adorno ('To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric') out of context and I just felt like he was in some parallel universe where spiders are like dogs and dogs are like spiders. He's a happy welsh boy and doesn't understand the concerns surrounding a module like this. Actually the other students are like that as well, I feel quite alone, but that's OK because I'll deal with it because it's just my thing. Everyone has a thing in their lives that's swamped by the fucked-upness of the world and this is mine. I kind of knew that, just not as clearly as I do now.

My mum, on the phone, said that as a last result my dad would write this essay for me because she didn't want me to do it and she knows that it would destroy me to have to do it. She's right, I can't do it, it's got me thinking about not coming back here and just walking - I could get in my car and never come back here. It wouldn't be right to do that though and I kind of want a degree and I can't let my parents bail me out of this one, so I'm going to tell them it straight, I am not doing this because I'm too young, I am third generation and it's their bloody faults that I'm mentally losing it because I didn't want to do this course anyway. They can take responsibility for their course, the trauma it's caused me, they can damn well give me something else to do.

17:51 / 09.12.02

Sounds valid to me.

Just musing now. I wonder if this sort of game is still acceptable in Our Institutes of Higher Learning:
Take the phrase "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" and deconstruct it.
The implication is that there's something wrong with barbarism, to begin with - the "barbarian" being that which is excluded from "empire". As in not-of-Reich, but also not-of-megalithic-construction-of-Holocaust (the Catholics and the Gypsies as well as the Jews).

Ambiguity in phrase "after Auschwitz" - imitation/homage, as in "I'm writing a poem after a Greek elegy" - also as in after Auschwitz there is only chaos, not form; the horrific triumph of order (the trains ran on time) has been broken (abstract expressionism, jazz, the cutup, as well as the second/third/likely fourth generation emotional aftermath). If the event is still being felt, is there really an "after"? Is there poetry without form?

I dunno. Obviously, if you're not writing anything, it'd be kind of hard writing about the inability to write....

18:47 / 09.12.02

Everyone has a thing in their lives that's swamped by the fucked-upness of the world and this is mine.

Well said, girl. It sounds as though you're making the right decision. I was lucky in this respect, since my own 'thing' is something that I dealt with partly by writing essays on it. But conversely, I had to walk out of a panel at a fanwriters' convention this summer that touched on it: so I know that sometimes you have to walk away, and that said, I think BiP has given full-on good advice.

Best of luck with dealing with the administrative nonsense that will no doubt result.

Goodness Gracious Meme

10:56 / 10.12.02

Deva: ouch, that sounds tough. May I offer belated outsider-ish alienated hugs?

Janina: Deva reiterates a good point: sometimes you do have to walk away. There's no need to take the hardest path unless you really get alot out of it. And if you don't, why should you keep flogging yrself?

Let us know how things turn out, hon.

12:43 / 10.12.02

May I offer belated outsider-ish alienated hugs?

Those are my very favourite kind of hugs. Thank you.

Tryphena Absent

12:33 / 11.12.02

Hooray, the world is good and Catherine Belsey is really nice and I'm going to be able to write again!

13:34 / 11.12.02

Hurrah!

(Go on then. Expound.)

14:23 / 11.12.02

They can take responsibility for their course... they can damn well give me something else to do.

Most definitely. Apparently, the deadline for final module choices in my department was 2nd week of term. I changed a module which accounts for 25% of my final degree mark in the 8th week (the administrator is going to say they made a registration error).

glad to hear you got your soul back, bird.

Goodness Gracious Meme

15:30 / 11.12.02

that's really fab. care to elaborate?

Tryphena Absent

15:15 / 12.12.02

ra-hah.

I am now writing about third generation holocaust survivors and the post traumatic effect that Auschwitz (etc.) has placed on them (thanks grant for that idea). Very exciting, I think I'm going to be using Plath as one of my... erm text isn't quite the right word. It means I can use a bit of Levi without having a complete mind-fuck of a moment when I actually have to apply it to people who were there and can instead write what I'm capable of.

20:25 / 12.12.02

Oooo! That's excellent!