Between Remembering and Forgetting in Adriana Altaras's Titos Brille (2011)

Abstract

Abstract: This article considers how the demands of forgetting collide with the imperative for a coherent familial narrative in Adriana Altaras's memoir Titos Brille (2011; Tito's eyeglasses). Altaras's work engages with her family's post–World War II trauma between Croatia and Germany and points toward the parallel demands of national memory politics. The memoir grapples with the pressures of maintaining a story's continuity while reaching the limits of this project, as processes of recollection and omission are in constant tension. This article contextualizes Altaras's work within contemporary German memory politics and then considers Altaras's memoir in conversation with Astrid Erll's concept of traveling memory , Marianne Hirsch's work on postmemory, and the dybbuk figure of Jewish folklore. A feminist recognition of Altaras's distinctive role at the center of memory work, attentive to inequities based on gender and religious and national affiliation, deepens an understanding of the personal and political stakes of this mediation process.