Panel: Ethical Considerations: Collaboration, Life Writing Texts, and
Translation
Copanelists: Marjorie Dryburgh and Rachel Robertson
My presentation will speak about the fascinating complications that have emerged as I research the life of a former National Socialist concentration camp guard, Hermine. My subject’s life before, during, and after the period of Third Reich can only be known in fragments, biographical fragments that have developed during a period of archival study in at least three countries, one of which (my own country, Canada) has produced very little information even though Hermine was able to land in Halifax, Nova Scotia after being released from prison on a conviction of war crimes in Austria. On some level Hermine is infamous, but on another she is unknown, and to a great extent, unknowable. Nevertheless, translating certain bits of her life for historical purposes allows us to deepen our sense of the scope of life writing, and to also communicate an identity that has crossed borders and nations with impunity, an identity that we may not want to preserve. This set of circumstances puts the life writing scholar in a potentially productive conundrum, an idea that will be explored in my presentation.
Marlene Kadar is Professor of Humanities and Women’s Studies at York University. She is currently on a research fellowship, writing a critical biographical study of a former concentration camp guard. Her recent publications probe the limits of difficult knowledge when the subject is not a celebrated figure, or when s/he cannot be. Kadar is founding Editor of the Life Writing Series (1995), Wilfrid Laurier University Press, which has just published its thirty-third book. In the recent past her work has focussed on the archival life writing fragment or trace, as in Tracing the Autobiographical, co-edited with Susanna Egan, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda Warley. Literary Editor of Canadian Woman Studies, Kadar has also published a collection of women’s poetry, The Missing Line (2004).