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REPRESENTATION OF THE HISTORICAL MEMORY OF WORLD WAR II IN LATVIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING: FAMILY STORIES
Abstract
The paper regards the subjective dimensions of the historical memory of World War II as represented in Latvian autobiographical writing. The selected authors, Anita Liepa, Sandra Kalniete and Mara Zalite, belong to the generation of children who witnessed the events of the war in the territory of Latvia and its consequences – deportations of Latvian citizens to Siberia in 1941 and the evacuation of Latvian people to Germany in 1944. In their autobiographical narratives they focus on their family story, bringing out complex psychological issues of trans-generational trauma and private dramas of people in the war and post-war time. The research methodology is discourse and textual analysis related to contemporary historiography and autobiography studies (by Hayden White, Maurice Halbwachs, Robet Folkenflik, Philip Lejeune, etc.) focusing on such aspects of memory textualization as modality and the mode of witness. The present research brings out certain patterns of historical memory representation through the private, family perspective. Anita Liepa in her autobiographical novels “Ekshumācija” and “Noklusētās lappuses” depicts a cyclical process of commemoration covering up the family trauma and emphasizing the socio-symbolical significance of the disclosing of the truth about war crimes and the victims of the soviet regime. Sandra Kalniete in her documentary narrative “With Dancing Shoes in Siberian Snows” and Māra Zālīte in her autobiographical novel “Pieci pirksti” present their family stories as introspection into the family trauma that becomes the central lens of revealing the violence and destructiveness of the war. The common ground of these texts is their revealing the mainstream post-soviet version of the history of Latvian occupation supported by documentary evidence and verified by the autobiographical act of the authors of bearing witness to the historical truth.
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