Dream narratives form a crucial part of our knowledge of the Shoah. For many survivors, they serve as a strategy for carrying on: they express experiences that can hardly be communicated in any other way. In this essay, the act of recounting and sharing dreams is understood as a paradoxical practice of reparation – both individual and collective. As important – indeed, as inevitable – as financial, political, and legal efforts at reparation may be, they consistently prove insufficient. Insofar as the destruction and trauma inflicted can never be “made good,” the cultural engagement with them takes on greater significance: as an ongoing process of coming to terms with irreparable experiences. Christiane Solte-Gresser presents a striking spectrum of dreams from Shoah survivors who give narrative expression to their traumatic experiences. At the same time, she explores the reparative potential of dreams for our cultural memory and their contribution to contemporary politics of remembrance.
Essay
Christiane Solte-Gresser, born in 1968, is a professor of general and comparative literature at Saarland University and director of the Käte Hamburger College for Cultural Practices of Reparation. She is president of the German Society for General and Comparative Literature and has held visiting and acting professorships at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Université d’Aix-Marseille.
