Ruth Wodak, Professor of Discourse Studies, LAEL, Lancaster University

Speaker: Ruth Wodak, Professor of Discourse Studies, LAEL, Lancaster University

Biography:

Ruth Wodak is Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University. Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Price for Elite Researchers in 1996 and is also head of the Wittgenstein Research Centre “Discourse, Politics, Identity” at the University of Vienna. Her research interests focus on discourse analysis; gender studies; language and/in politics; prejudice and discrimination; and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work. She is member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals and co-editor of the journals “Discourse and Society”, Critical Discourse studies, and “Language and Politics”. She has held visiting professorships in Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota and Georgetown University. See http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/staff and http://www.univie.ac.at/discourse-politics-identity for more information on on-going research projects and recent publications.

Title: "Remembering and Forgetting: Narratives Coping with Traumatic Pasts"

Abstract:

In this paper, I will approach the problem of the dialectics between individual and collective memories, using narratives of former German (Austrian) Wehrmacht soldiers interviewed in an exhibition on the German Wehrmacht 1995 (“Vernichtungskrieg der deutschen Wehrmacht 1941-1944 ) as an example (see Heer et al. Wie Geschichte gemacht wird”, Vienna 2003). In these stories - also used for a film by the Austrian film producer Ruth Beckerman (“East of War”) - the former soldiers talk about their war time experiences and mostly deny “having seen or known anything in relationship with the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and civilians”

The narratives are often not contextualized and of a more general nature: “stories about fighting and surviving the ‘normal war’”. During the interviews, however, time and location are slowly specified, mostly through the confrontation with the pictures on the wall of the exhibition and also through the questions of the interviewer. A negotiation about time and place starts, with the aim of emphasizing that the respective interviewee was NOT at a place where crimes had been committed or not at the specific time suggested by the evidence; or the interviewees denied that crimes had taken place at all (Wodak 2006a, b).

Such strategies of denial and justification are, of course, not new; they could be observed in several instances when aspects of the NS past were debated in the Austrian public sphere (see Wodak 2004, Discourses of Silence). They also occur nowadays, when traumatic incidents are discussed, such as the debates about the pictures of tortured civilians in Iraq or when images of the war in Bosnia were shown around the world in the media. The impact of photographs for “remembering and forgetting” thus has to be focused upon.

The justification discourse also includes the analysis of knowledge structures, which are intertwined with “time” and “space”. “Knowing or not knowing” the time, the location, or specific commands, groups of people or ideologies, becomes a central issue in “dealing with traumatic pasts”.

The data for this analysis stem inter alia from an interdisciplinary project, dealing with “The Making of History”, where inter alia 40 hours of video interviews, as well as documentaries, films, schoolbooks, newspapers and other genres were analyzed.