Contribution short abstract:

Narratives have ability to stop time and shake the earth. This one, about a (presumably) murdered person (presumably) buried on grounds belonging to my family, opened up a sudden and quite unwanted connection to post-war realities, cruelties, and memories that have been kept deep underground.

Contribution long abstract:

Narratives have ability to stop time and shake the earth. This one, about a (presumably) murdered person (presumably) buried on grounds belonging to my family, opened up a sudden and quite unwanted connection to post-war realities, cruelties, and memories that have been kept deep underground.

A short story, a sentence really, delivered during a pleasant evening over a glass of wine, had me crushing through the layers of history back to the 1940s. The story considered a person, identified as 'a Jew'. This is not a unique story, it is also not new. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe there are not only narratives, but also bodies, that are ignored, not spoken about, nameless, forgotten, general in nature and alluding to 'normality' of their existence under buildings, roads, hidden deep in the collective memory.

This presentation is an attempt to unpact the emotions of guilt, shame, and responsibility through a strange narrative that is rather preposterous and sensless, but (unfortunately) it makes sense in the spacio-temporal context that it exists in. A story of a murder that (presumably) occured around 78 years ago, still has a nameless victim and tropes that explain and excuse the context and situation of the occurence. The narrative positionings used in the story put the sense into nonsens, thus making in not only believable, but also inevitable.