Departament of Analysis of Social Institutions, Professor

Dr.Elena Rozhdestvenskaya

Departament of Analysis of Social Institutions, Professor

State University Higher School of Economics

Chief Researcher of Sociology Institute of Russia Academy of Sciences

Biographic Work for the Return of the Meaning: Stories of Ostarbeiters’ Lives

Abstract

The article focuses on the “incoherente and incomplete” as the biographical trauma as well as on the efforts of biographants on its compensation and the return of the meaning. It is based on the life stories of Ostarbeiters. The concept of trauma is linked to the catastrophic experience and desubjectivization. The analysis of the interviews reveals not only the destructive effect of the socio-historical events in the biographies of the narrators, but also their strategies in overcoming the biographical gaps, which can be traced both at the level of their life courses and on the plane of the stories.

About the project

This article is based on materials of the international documentary project, “Forced and Slave Labour.”[1] They are the biographical interviews with those who were forcefully taken to work in Germany and have experienced the burdens of the forced labour.[2] The biographies of Ostarbeiters that are collected in the tradition of Oral History, are gradually taking their place in the common space of symbolic memory of war which, however, is not uniformly represented or given value. The task that united the projects of different countries was, first and foremost, the documentation of experiences and archiving of the collected audiovisual information. Our research interest focused on three basic categories, or groups: the representatives of the civilian population from the occupied territories, who were forcefully taken to Germany to work, the military personnel who became POW and had to do forced labour, and the people who had to work during the occupation where they lived. Sociological approach required us to see the life stories of our biographants not only as a source of oral historical knowledge, but, more importantly, as “testimonies,” which were placed within the space of life with the everyday background of microsocial history.

This international project not only elicited the common trauma of the war generation of different countries, but also revealed different trajectories of this social group depending on a country. The possibility of talking about the past was legitimate not for everyone, because the prospect of repressions (by the Soviet government and society) upon returning from forced labour blocked the integration of this experience into the collective memory of the Ostarbeiter community, which formed in Russia only in the 1990s during the campaign of the compensations’ payments from the German institutions.

Transformation of a subject

The collected stories of the Russian Ostarbeiters present not only the oral-historical or archival interest as the testimonies of the page of the war history that has not been yet finished. From the philosophical point of view, they are documents of the biopolitical (in the terms of M.Foucault) experiment with the conditions of existence that change subjects, depriving them from subjectivity, or, better said, subjectness. This regimen of the desubjectivization is described in the paradoxes of Primo Levi. The first one states: “ A muslim [ a concentration camp dohodiaga[3]] is an ultimate witness,” but his/her subjectivity as a witness is split: “Witness, as an ethical subject is a subject who is indicating the loss of subjectivity.” The second paradox of Levi is “Human is only the one who can outlive a human…” the double surviving, or outliving, is expressed in the idea that the non-human is the one who is a leftover after outliving, or surviving the human. In other words, the witness in dohodiaga can outlive, or survive the dohodiaga. “That what can be endlessly destroyed, can endlessly survive” (cited from B. Dubin 2009, p.7).

However, it is also a sociologically important material that calls for study. According to P.Levi, double survival results in identification gaps. One, but not the only one, difficulty in studying it is related to the fact that experienced privations, suffering and fear provoke narrators to use ‘newspeak” that requires its own semiotic decoding and psychotherapeutic approach. What attracts attention even more is the biographic work of the narrators, which is aimed at overcoming the trauma-stigma that is felt and partially realized by them as the deviation from the biographical norm of the generation. These peculiar “repairs” of the biographies can be traced at two levels – on the plane of the reconstruction of life courses themselves as attempts to bring them closer to the biography norm,[4] and on the plane of the life story-telling, as narrative strategies of representation of life events.

Trauma

First of all, it is important to mention the terminological conflict, with which the use of the concept of trauma is laden in sociology and history. Thanks to work of P. Sztompka, sociologists added the study of the plot, or scenario of trauma to their armamentarium. Cultural traumas are thematized and interpreted as the consequences of the collisions of the cultural values of a given society with the “alien” and unfriendly surroundings, as the large-scale crisis of the basic values, meanings and bearings of the social reality ( Sztompka 2001). Previous rules of social order are now challenged and doubted, which brings about the loss of individual and group identity. Later, emerges the sociological aspect of the counter-trauma as the efforts of dis-adaptants towards resocialization and as an indication of healing of the social fabric. From the point of view of A.Zdravomyslov,

“Trauma is the experience of pain, which is a powerful motivator to an activity whose character is irrational. Traumas form as a result of defeats, failed hopes, of abrupt changes in the habitual social environment, and as the memory of losses. They acquire mass character, and in the cases when the source of pain does not find a rational explanation as well as the ways to overcome it, this leads to the degradation of will, to spontaneous transformation of the entire structure of relations within society.” (A.Zdravomyslov 2008, p.6)

According to A.Zdravomyslov,

“a society finds in itself the power of overcoming the trauma…firstly, through a different composition of social act, which creates a social base for the overcoming of the traumatic consciousness.” (ibid., p.10)

We, however, would like to stress the fact that, in addition to the cultural rationalization, the overcoming of trauma largely depends on the discursive accessibility of the trauma narrative and its rotation within a culture, and also the possibility of narrator’s acquisition of the status of the expert witness. It is not an accident that Schindler’s archive is inaccessible to the external analysis. It is meant for the cultural memory of the ethnic community that survived Shoah and its goals of collective identification. This version of countertrauma most poignantly illustrates the ambiguity of the term itself. It preserves the information about the trauma itself or, rather, the collective narrative about the trauma together with the inevitable victimization.

Historians (A.M.Rutkevich, I.M.Savelieva, A.V. Poletaev) strongly opposed the notion of the “historic memory,” and the use of the term trauma which, according to them, brings into the socio-historical discourse medical-psychoanalytical context, which affects the methodology of the historic research. “Publicly recalling one’s sufferings is a great way to receive privileges or even monetary compensations,” writes A.M. Rutkevich (A.M.Rutkevich 2005, p. 247). Thus, speaking of the history of the XXth century, with its huge amount of testimonies of the victims of concentration camps, wars, deportations, genocides, A.M. Rutkevich ask the question about what to do with this data: “A historian needs it to find out what really was happening in the past, while this information is often collected for entirely different purposes” (ibid., p. 237). Indeed, to a sociologist, for example, such testimonies are important in their own right – not only as the source of comparative information of an event. They are important even if the informant is lying; in this case, the lie construct has to be deconstructed from the point of view of its functional role in the construction of the narrative identity. Arguing with the proponents of the concept of historic memory, A.M. Rutkevich sees in it as the only non-trivial idea the theory of “collective traumatized memory.” However, he also sees this theory as false, because to have a collective traumatic experience or memory, the (false) concept of collective psyche would be needed. The latter argument we see as somewhat forced and oversimplifying the picture. Any, not necessarily traumatic experience that is collectively shared, which is understood, following K. Mannenheim as “conjunctive space of experience,” gives birth to a typology of structures of group consciousness, which would closely interpret as visual signs both the necktie of Eaton School and the numerical tattoo on the wrist. Specifically sociological view of group trauma (indeed, individuals are the competence of other departments, sciences or paradigms) takes into account posttraumatic social situation. It emerges as the field of activities, which are possible or impossible after the trauma as well as the presence or marked absence intra-collective and discursive narrative about the trauma, its structure, gaps and repairs as biographic strategies of exiting the trauma together with narrative ways of its delivery and the mobilization of the biographic resources for the overcoming of traumatic experience.

We are inclined to share the position of P. Sztompka and A.Zdravomyslov, especially with respect to biographic material, qualitatively oriented methodology of the collection of materials (narrative interviews) and the analysis of life stories. Nonetheless, the concept of trauma in this context needs a number of decoding and replacement terms, with which we could have been satisfied, if we saw as possible either ignoring or distancing from inevitably introduced subjectivity of the narrators, which gets concealed by the use of some terms through over-rationalization. Among the thus concealed aspects are the loss of meaning (the crisis of the relations, or connections between the past and the present, due to which the past is devalued, or an experience that destroys the possibilities of its interpretation), the loss of the meaningful internal connections within biographical construct or of the coherence[5] of biography. As an empirically accessible phenomenon, this continuum of problems is revealed in biographic gaps, in the impossibility to narrators of a combination of all phases of their life courses in the single space of the story, that is, in the collapse of the integral narrative, in its fragmentation, lacunae, figures of silence(ing), and other narrative strategies. In this sense, narrative identity, at whose pragmatic and locally situated level the “repairs” of a biography are taking place is an important field of analysis of the resources, with which the narrators are accomplishing the most important task of their lives – gathering and getting their Selves together.

The catastrophic nature of experience.

In the analysis of these biographies we partially rely on the cultural anthropological approach of J. Rüsen in his study of the crisis of historic memory, which emerges when the historic consciousness collides with an experience that goes far beyond the boundaries of the idea of the socio-historic norm, that is, of a catastrophic experience. In J. Rüsen’s opinion, approaching the microhistory, the particular biographies, is paying attention to the ways, in which people perceived and interpreted their own world. It is penetration into the consciousness of the studied people in an effort to give them back the cultural autonomy of the perception of their own world in their own way, which is different from ours. (J. Rüsen 2001, p. 12). Asserting the challenged methodological rationality of such an approach, he writes that “[t]here is no memory that absolutely does not aspire to be truth-like, and this ambition rests on two elements: the transsubjective elements of the experience and the intersubjective element of the agreement” (ibid., p. 13). If memory is a fixed and reproduced experience that is transmitted in social and family narratives, then intersubjectivity is another element of the historic meaning. History is unthinkable without an agreement of those to whom it is addressed. However, Rüsen continues, “its truth-likeness depends not only on its relation to the experience. It also depends on its relation with norms and values as the elements of the historic meaning that are shared by the community, to which this history is addressed” (ibid., p. 13), that is, on the discursive rules that create the intersubjective agreement.

Thus, we are approaching collected biographies of Ostarbeiters as the space of the traumatized and, we add, ruptured, incoherent social identity. On one hand, they suffer the pressure of the crisis of meaning from the direction of discursive rules, which make uncertain the intersubjective agreement of other social groups of Soviet society regarding the place and role of Ostarbeiters and the evaluation and acceptance of their after-war narrative. On the other hand, from the point of view of subjects themselves, the catastrophic experience that was lived through cannot be assigned any meaning[6] and is thus disowned through the 1) escape into the forms of group narrative, 2) fragmentation of story, or 3) through omission and silence.

In its language marker “we,” collective or group experience reflects the logic of everyday life. The used pronouns, as the figurative language web indicate the projective image of social surroundings and the boundaries of a social subject. In the following example from an interview, “we” semantically transforms into the passive voice of the used verbs (“us”), creating an image of repressive social order, an impression of forcedness and faceless machine-like nature of the events.