Susanne Knittel (Utrecht University):
June 14, 2022
Goethe University Frankfurt, Campus Westend
Watch the recording here.
Download the poster here.
The past two decades have witnessed a palpable “turn” to the perpetrator in art, theater, documentary filmmaking, literature, and other cultural arenas. This has gone hand in hand with a growing interest, within cultural memory studies, in questions of guilt, complicity, and responsibility in large scale violence. The figure of the perpetrator poses fundamental challenges to memory studies, which as a field has largely come into being around the figures of the victim and the witness. In this talk I will explore the implications of the perpetrator “turn” for cultural memory studies, focusing specifically on the ethical, aesthetic, and political questions that arise when we consider how we remember perpetrators of mass atrocities and how those perpetrators themselves remember their actions after the fact. I am particularly interested in perpetrator testimony, both oral and written, documentary and fictional, and how it is framed, staged, and (re)mediated in cultural forms. Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, film, and documentary theater, this talk aims to provide an overview of the most salient representational strategies for the cultural encounter with the figure of the perpetrator.
Susanne Knittel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In her research, she explores questions of memory, commemoration, and responsibility; the figure of the perpetrator and the politics of memory; and the relationship betwen memory studies, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. She is the author of The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (Fordham UP, 2015; German translation Unheimliche Geschichte: Grafeneck, Triest, und die Politik der Holocaust-Erinnerung, Transcript 2018) and the editor, with Zachary Goldberg, of the Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies (2019). Her current research focuses on the figure of the perpetrator in contemporary memory culture. She is the founder of the Perpetrator Studies Network and editor-in-chief of JPR: The Journal of Perpetrator Research. Her current research focuses on the contemporary cultural imagination of genocide and ecocide.