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Language within the Battle between History and Memory in David Albahari’s Götz and Meyer

The dilemma of transmitting traumatic experiences has haunted the intellectual world for most of the twenties century. It has taken on an even greater importance after the events of World War II, especially the systematic extermination of peoples achieved in Nazi concentration camps. By the 1990’s many have come to realize that both the personal first-hand accounts of holocaust survivors and the attempts of historians and anthropologists to describe the logistic details of procedures or their impact on collective memory will always contain a lacuna. Giorgio Agamben explores the lacuna present in testimony of survivors—the inevitable paradox of the living being unable to actually tell about the act dying. He approaches the problem from a number of metaphysical perspectives, observing idiosyncrasies of personal and collective memory, going beyond the obvious fact that the survivors cannot tell about the experience of those who suffocated in the gas chambers. Although most professional historians rarely question the ability of facts, obtained in prescribed manner, to narrate the past, a similar lacuna has been recognized by writers in other fields, such as anthropologists, psychologists, and literary theorists, even in these narratives. David Albahari presents his narrator with this same problem in Götz and Meyer. He exaggerates the existence of this lacuna by starting the narrator with no initial knowledge of the past he is trying to recreate. As the language and literature teacher pieces together the fate of his family that perished at the hands of the Nazis in Belgrade, he uses concrete historical facts coming from archival documents, the few personal accounts of survivors, and his own imagination. The first and the last—history and imagination—work together to take over the narrator’ being with the memory of the past. The archival and research information fuels his imagination, which, in turn, acts as a tool for him to instill the memory of what happened to the Jews