« Créer des lieux » : Mémoire, Heimat et revendication d'espace dans l'écriture chez Philomena Franz

Abstract

When Philomena Franz first published her memories of her experiences in the concentration camps of the Third Reich as Zwischen Liebe und Hass in 1985, she introduced a remarkable shift from Romani oral tradition to German language Romani writing. In this text, Franz establishes her identity as a German Romani writer, placing her own written memories in the context of German and Romani collective memories. This article looks specifically at the 2001 edition of Zwischen Liebe und Hass, where Franz includes three of her own fairy tales at the end of her narrative. I explore how Franz experiments with the boundaries of genre in writing and ‘working through’ the traumatic experience of losing her entire family in the Holocaust by locating and asserting a space for her own memories and an emerging Romani collective memory1. I examine her use of language, her illustration of moments of connection with non-Romanies, her portrayal of the German landscape, and how these elements of her narrative work towards claiming territorial and non-territorial Heimat for Romanies. This paper demonstrates that Franz is able to transcend the sense of emptiness and loss of voice she experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust by drawing upon her personal history and Romani storytelling traditions and re-defining them as part of the history of Germany; Franz’s act of writing her memories into German language and written tradition places her words and memories of Romani victims of the Holocaust within the landscape and history of Germany.