Lahvová pošta. O „vlastním životě“ archivů židovských vzpomínek
Messages in Bottles: About Archives of Jewish Memories, Which Are Living Their Own Lives

Summary/Abstract: This article is based on archive materials deposited in the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung (Centre for Research on Antisemitism), Berlin. These documents mainly consist of the recorded memories of survivors of the Shoah, but also include diaries, photographs, letters, and audiovisual testimonies. The article compares them to messages in bottles that castaways throw into the sea. Material documents of this sort may not build a complete and accurate testimony about the past, since they tend to be fragile, but they can be tools to stimulate cultural memory and protect society against forgetting. Surviving Jews do not usually describe normal life in their autobiographical memories. They concentrate on the remembrance of suffering and seek to give credible testimony about the death of those close to them. Immediately after the Second World War, autobiographical literature concerning the Holocaust served mainly to improve knowledge about this event. It is now a valuable tool for vividly revisiting the past. In recent years, public attention has been increasingly focused on literary adaptations, and not only on the event itself. Archive material has become a source of inspiration for works of literature. For instance, the stories of W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) are constructed as narratives based on documents, some of which are fiction. On the other hand, literature can assume some of the characteristics of an archive, to be an inventory of lost memories, for instance, the autobiographical novel of Georges Perec (1936–1982), Wou le souvenir d’enfance (W, or the Memory of Childhood, 1975).

• Details
• Contents