The Impact of Magic Realism on Traumatic Representation and Engagement with the Holocaust
According to Anderson, Jean, Carolina Miranda and Pezzotti (2015, p.4) magic realism is perhaps potentially active factor in facilitating traumatic representation that would otherwise be difficult. However, it has indeed proved to be very productive in Holocaust representation. Although Doron Rabinovici is not necessarily a Holocaust novel, The Search for M are perhaps examples of Jewish writings is continued with a subtle effect. In trying to come to terms with the past happenings, magic realism is a vehicle for trauma articulation but most importantly for an engagement with the impact on other generations.
He was born in 1961 in Tel Aviv. He grew up in Austria and went to school there. He was also a member of the small group of post-Holocaust Jewish fellowship Community as he indeed had special interests in history and this led him to write extensively on essays and fictional work in his journalism (Beetz 2017, p.9). He wrote on the historical development and study of how the Nazis forced the Jews to submit and cooperate together with them and specifically taking the example of the Jewish Council in Vienna.
He wrote during the Holocaust when over six million Jews were exterminated by running propaganda machinery against them. The persecution of the Jews began as early as 1933 but the extermination itself happened during the World War II. There was no escape route for the Jews, they were hunted down like dogs and traced from every hidden crevice. The crime of belonging to the Jewish community was grave and every single one had to be killed. They were all to suffer and die and there was no hope, reprieve, amnesty and or any survival chance for any person of the Jewish descent.
Definitely, Doron was one of those people affected by the call to exterminate the Jews. The mother to Doron, Schoschana Rabinovici was only 8 years old in 1941 during Nazis invasion in Vilnius (Bertens & Fokkema 1997, p.31). In one of her autobiography written in Hebrew in 1991, she jots down how together with her mother, they manage to survive the vagaries of the death marches and the concentration camps.
In a theatre project, The Last Witness in Vienna in 2013/2014, she describes how six Jews survived the concentration camp right on the stage but silently behind the visible see-through the screen. In the theatre, their faces were projected in close-up as their memories were recited by the other younger actors. The theatre also showed the photographs in the 1930s in Vienna. After the procession of the theatre, the elderly people in the years ranging between 80 and 100 years old come forward and then give their speeches reflecting on the present situation and the future message.
The Life and Work of Doron Rabinovici
The eventual happening of the death of the Jews was a characterization step one after another eventually leading to the heinous acts of such killings. The ban on the proposed treaty failed and later characteristic of huge inflation marked by unemployment resulting in both social and economic problems (Hoesterey 1991, p.9). There was also an ideological shift especially because of the high-end programs in social services and public housing programs that led to high taxation on the rich and these revolutionary development projects increased anxiety in Austria especially among the conservative groups and in rural areas (Brunotte 2014, p.71).
There was a crackdown on the people with socialist views and this led to civil war between the socialist themselves and the army. The fighting led to the death of 196 socialist people and 118 of their opponents. The attempts for the creation of new fascist Austria were under heavy opposition by the many nationalist and this encouraged Hitler’s and German propaganda. The Austrian Nazi party began a series of terrorist attacks and it was banned. Hitler responded by back by the imposition of a charge on the Germans who wanted to visit Austria. The attempts of Dollfuss, the chancellor to create a new fascist Austria were thwarted as he was assassinated in the Nazis’ putsch attempt (Machtans, Karolin, and Martin 2012, p, 81).
The Search for M, at the beginning of the first episode, shows the favorite café that had undergone renovation after the onset of the war. The walls were indeed white-washed and in the indication, one of the glass façades looked out towards the beautifully designed and magnificent boulevard of the long known royal capital (Ellington 2014, p.41). The other façade was towards the monument and the square to the famous world anti-Semite. The running plot for the Search for M revolves the livelihood in Vienna of the generations of the Holocaust survivors together with their children and the European Jews.
Consequently, the first generation member survivors, their sense of identity was destroyed and undermined by the historical happenings and their capability of passing on to their offspring a sense of belonging and worth is in doubt. The life of the Doron as part of the second generation group illustrate the resultant effects of legacy (Rabinovici 2000, p.41). In the narrative, Dani Morgenthau’s self-boundary sense is in doubt and undergoes suffering just like an adult in the pathological compulsion in claiming the guilt of the people regarded as criminals.
The Rise of Fascism in Austria and Its Consequences on the Jewish Community
In another instance, Arieh Bein comes forth with a similar psychological defect as an agent for Israel Secret Service (Hess 2010, p.34). With bare evidence to proceed, he exposes the enemies of the state of Israel and ultimately setting these people up for assassination. The novel during the end, it reaches a resolution when the two figure’s lives intersect.
In one of the writings, as an activist, one of the Search for M standing for searching for Murderers. The novel writes and addresses a number of issues including the disturbing view from the perspective of the murderer. The search also discusses the psychological approach to the same view with the critical importance and value of the mass media in the society. The use of the detective figure also comes as a split subject in different contextual settings both as a double agent and also in investigation identities.
In The Search for M, Mullemann gives a confession the Keyser’s murderers through written letters (Igarashi 2000, p.72). The Lang’s missing sequence indicates groups of natives and citizens taking upon themselves and claiming to be the real murderers. They then write letters as they shred type from the written newspapers in order to hide their visible handwritings (Anton, Macmillan, 2008). The part of the papers that had been shredded showed dialogue in one of the films by Lang admitting murder and indeed this indicates the mantra in Mullemann’s assertions that he was guilty.
Haruki Murakami is known as a non-conformist. He stands out among the large Japanese community that then values conformity and semblance of harmony despite the existence of ethnic minorities and also unresolved historical issues in the society. He was born in Japan in Kansai but moved to Tokyo for his studies (Lyotard 1984, p.69). While growing up, he liked the early fictional American English writers. He also had great interests in history. In 1968, he refused to participate in a group action when students decided to protest in Tokyo. However, it is ironical that he was disillusioned when the student movement was crushed. In his sharing of these facts, he indeed accepts that they shaped his early fictions. In his writing career, he Hears the Wind Sing in the year 1978 that won the Gunzo award. Others include the Pinball in 1973 but then published in 1980, and A Wild Sheep Chase in 1982 (Murakami and Alfred Birnbaum 2003, p.31).
Murakami loved horror films like Stephen King, Chandler including detective stories. He did not like much writings, but cherished the use of the fictional story structures and then add content to the structures. For instance, in Pinball, he writes about a protagonist who wakes up apparently between twin girls whom he never finds out their names. The setting happens apparently in late summer. In the narration, the plot itself alternates between the protagonist’s life in Tokyo and Rat’s life. The structure of the A Wild Sheep Chase was greatly influenced by Chandler’s detective novels (Rzepka 2005, p.65). Murakami admits that he wanted to apply his plot structure in his novel and this had great implications in the way he was to structure his very novel perhaps to suit Chandler’s plot.
For instance, in the structure, the protagonist would be on a search for something and during this process, he would become caught up in complicated situations. By the time he finds whatever he is looking for, it already would have come under ruins and or even lost (Lubin 2016, p.34). However, he was not trying to write a mystery novel because a mystery novel must have some form of mystery that is being solved. He wanted to jot down a mystery that did not have a solution and so he used a mystery novel structure and then filled it with different and diverse ingredients.
Murakami’s work and writings have been dismissed by many as apolitical and cannot be counted for historically. It is opined that most of his writings are set in defined periods and can be taken aggregately as the history of psychology on Japanese events post-war. He records quite a number of events and processes Japan went through to its then status. These include the growth of the Japanese empire recognizing the threat from the West, the Sino-Japanese, and the annexure of Korea. He also records in the novels the rape of the Nanjing that began in 1937 and went through for solid six weeks. The horrific event led to the death of tens of thousands amounting to about 300, 000 people (Sharp 2011, p.38).
Murakami then writes about the issues of sex slavery in the novel the ‘Comfort Women’ and also the events of the human beings used in the experiments. Other subjects include the slave labor. The Chinese and Japanese women were forced into sexual slavery then by the Japanese Army. He records how he went to Manchuria several weeks before and visited some local villages (Sta?hler 2013, p.57). The villagers reported that the Japanese soldiers exterminated closely approximately five dozens of human beings. He could also see the mass grave and thereby wrote on the need of not forgetting the past, but not living in it.
Several reactions to the book have indicated that reading the book by Murakami sounds like a comic book or even worse off a sport’s page. Unlike Doron, Murakami’s work notion of objective history is skewed and the vagaries of postmodernity have been at the center of influencing some of these modern writers into writings of the subjective history of events (Williams 2010, p.41).
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