The Banality of Agency: Bridging Personal Narrative and Political Economy

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This is a set of papers about connections and about family ties. In each case, the authors narrate a personal story laden with emotions, risks, disruptions, and violence. But these are also stories of resilience, metamorphosis, and survival. In each case, the narratives of suffering and trauma are embedded in social and political contexts, providing a springboard for examining some of the larger social processes, historical forces, and related structures that are implicated in much of the violence characterizing both the twentieth century and our current times. Therein lies the idea behind the title of this collection: bringing the past into the present. To start with Barbara Rylko-Bauer's portrait of her mother, one wonders at what moment the author realized that her mother was also prisoner #32220 at Ravensbriick, #32049 in Gross Rosen, and on, in other slave labor camps. This is recovered memory-in many ways not only for Dr. Rylko, Sr., but also for her daughter, who endeavored to reconstruct her mother's story and learn about it in what proved to be a very complicated and indirect process. It is worth noting that Dr. Rylko worked as a slave doctor to a slave labor force, hundreds of Jewish women who had to work for a private German firm. The effort of the slave laborers was being used to generate private profit in industry. While many kinds of horror, specifically the press toward genocide, are notorious and frequently recollected from those years, the scandal of enslavement is a less visible memory. Stories are nonetheless available to be pieced together: the 280-mile trek, the typhus, and similar events. As Dr. Rylko said, so much has been written already about all this; documentation exists. But that the slave labor camps served German firms and international capital in general is less well understood. It is as if the cruelty and hatred directed at genocide victims has obliterated the memory of the mechanisms by which the concentration camps were established and justified in the first place, well before any talk of a final solution to the problem of a multi-ethnic Europe. The challenge laid out in the first paper is this: what are the paths that might lead us from a political economy of the Holocaust all the way to the psychological and social processes that are mentioned in each of these papers and that are evident in the experiences of the mother, the father, the aunt of contributor Erika Bourguignon, and of Bourguignon herself? This is a challenge because clearly (as Philippe Bourgois' father insisted) part of the story is still not remembered, is still hidden away. The craven behavior of the powerful in general, in addition to the criminal, genocidal behavior of the Nazis, is still not fully taken into account; as Rylko-Bauer notes, the story is not yet resocialized. Another recurring theme is this: How did events in Poland, both in the prewar period and the 1940s, determine or shape, in many ways, not only the life course of each of these family members, but also their interior lives? Erika Bourguignon, who has led investigations in this arena for decades, has sought to make us understand the cognitive, psychological, and affective experience of these violences. What leaves a mark is not only the dramatic violence of the camps: Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, Flossenburg; or of the slaughter in villages and towns such as Jedwabne; or of the arrests, the detentions, and the threat of terror; but also the less spectacular violence that each of these people endured and survived, the accumulated blows that proved fatal to many others. A further theme is the rejection of relativism by mother or father, and also by Bourguignon herself, as a refugee. For our protagonists and authors, it is inconceivable that one survivor's experience in the camps should be the same as that of another. Most of the major writers of the Holocaust, who were themselves survivors, have remarked on social inequalities inside the camps as well as the ghettos. …