Journeying into Uncertainty: Representations of Memory Loss in Kindertransport Fiction and Drama

Abstract

In this essay, I ask why the image of memory loss, one that is often explicitly identified as dementia, appears in close association with contemporary representations of the Kindertransport. In doing so, I will explore the figure of the former Kind, or refugee child, in plays by Wendy Graf and Rose Lewenstein, as well as fiction by Linda Newbery. Detailed readings of these works reveal a fictive ambivalence about forgetting on the part of individuals whose experience is firmly associated in the public mind with its opposite, that of remembrance in the form of memorial and educational practices. Although the Kinder are sometimes described as refugees or exiles rather than survivors, the Kindertransport initiative is central to “public narratives about the Holocaust,” notably so in Britain (Sharples 2012, 15). We might expect portrayals of dementia in this context to be symbolic expressions of anxiety at the impending end of the “era of the witness” (Wieviorka 2006). However, despite a focus on childhood disruption, each of the twenty-first century examples discussed here has a more consolatory effect than this suggests. The presence of the image of dementia in the examples here contrasts with previous fictional versions of the Kindertransport experience, in which loss of memory is associated with suppression rather than disease, and its recovery with anguish rather than reassurance (Brookner 1988; Sebald 2001). This absence of consolation is also evident in an earlier text which this essay’s twenty-first-century examples recall in intertextual terms, Diane Samuels’s play Kindertransport, first staged in 1993. Dementia’s role as an organic state that entails forgetting acts in the more recent works to absolve the former Kind of responsibility for managing the memory of the past and to pass the mantle of its recall to the next generation. This entails an “optimistic” effect (Behrendt 2010, 400), with an emphasis on mollification and coming to terms with the past that might sit uncomfortably with the painful nature of what is remembered.