Interview

Acknowledging Personal Presence in the Embodied Nature of Scholarship - A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

This interview was conducted at the conference Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts. Bowling Green, Ohio, United States, 23 to 26 March 2006. [accepted for publication by Cambridge Scholars Press].

JULIA K. BAKER: I am always surprised at how much both of you share about your personal lives in your academic work. I have never come across anybody else who reveals so many personal details, photographs, letters, and memories in their writing. From my point of view as a reader, this is one of the many aspects that make your work so approachable and attractive. Have you always written like that or how did this writing develop? Do you sometimes regret your strong presence in your texts?

LEO SPITZER: I have not always written like that. I am a historian and, generally speaking, academic historians tend to avoid the personal voice. In “orthodox” academic historical practice, the historian is not supposed to be evident in the text. Such historical work is characterized by a seamless narrative and impersonal, omniscient, historical voice – by the avoidance of the historian’s personal voice, and a masking of the constructed nature of historical inquiry and writing. What happened was that I began to resist these conventions – these presentations of an omniscient, “objective,” historical voice devoid of personality and subjectivity. I wanted to show how the historian is invested in the construction of a historical account – how he or she shapes and constructs it as an embodied being, with a subjectivity and personal history that needs to be taken into account. So I therefore began to introduce my personal voice into my historical writing.
In the first book I wrote, The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Reactions to Colonialism, my personal voice is actually not very evident in the narrative text. But when I started working on my second book, Lives in Between, I became very interested in comparing Jewish emancipation, assimilation and exclusion with that of Africans and Afro-Brazilians over the course of the late 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. My idea was to carry out that analysis through comparative family history. And in the early stages of my research an incredible thing happened. Searching for materials on Jewish families on whom I might focus, I went to the Leo Baeck Institute in NY to see what, in their rich archival holdings, they might have on the family of Stefan Zweig (who had been one of my parents’ favorite authors). When I examined their catalogue, I found that, among other holdings, they owned a Zweig family genealogy. But the catalogue reference I had found read: “for Zweig, see Spitzer.” This was so weird. The explanation for this of course was that in the 18th century, Zweigs and Spitzers had intermarried in the Habsburg realm -- and, indeed, when I then began to unravel the genealogy of that family and to expand on it, I realized that I was researching not only the story of the family of Stefan Zweig but also that of a branch of my own family. And I became so personally invested and involved in that story that I felt that my personal voice needed to be apparent in the book I was writing. And after competing that book I decided that my voice should certainly be visible in my subsequent work, Hotel Bolivia, which is a book about Jewish emigration to Latin America in the era of World War II – a story in which I was both a personal participant and of which I became a historian. And in the aftermath of that book – at this point – I can no longer conceive of writing history without acknowledging my personal presence.
So there you go, a very long answer to a short question.

MARIANNE HIRSCH: I probably have a long answer for you too. No, I did not always write that way because that is not how we were taught to write at all. When I was first in college and graduate school, we did not even use “I” in our papers, and in fact I “grew up” with New Criticism and Structuralism, so even the authors of the literary works we were writing about remained almost anonymous. We were interested in the text which was not even historically contextualized. The author’s biography was not important, and then, in structuralism, there was the death of the author in favor of the text. It’s really been a long route from then to where I am now. On the other hand, I would say that almost everything I have written and published has been personal. My dissertation was about exile and emigration, about how different worlds interact with one another in the space of narrative. As an immigrant myself, I closely identified with Henry James’s, Michel Butor’s and Uwe Johnson’s characters and with the narrative choices the author’s made. Later, when I became involved in feminist work, I wrote about mothers and daughters, and that also was very personal. Mostly the personal part was in the introduction and preface; the rest was a theoretical and literary discussion of mothers and daughters. It was when I started working on family photography, that I found that you could not analyze that genre without actually looking at your own photographs. To account for the power of these objects, of why a small square of paper is invested with so much affect, we really have to look at our own family images and think about them closely. And that is where the self-revelation and the more autobiographical writing came in for me, and became important not only to do, but also to interrogate.

But of course none of this is separate from what was happening in the world of scholarship at large: I think there has to be a permission to do that kind of work. When we first started to do that, we were actually fellows at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and we were involved in a seminar on personal criticism and personal scholarship. We read a lot of examples and talked about them. It was a moment: Alice Kaplan had published French Lessons, for example, and Nancy K. Miller Getting Personal. There were some who were very skeptical, they thought this kind of writing to be too narcissistic, too exhibitionist. By reading examples, you could tell that often there is a very fine line of saying too much or too little. And, as you said, using personal material to make a larger theoretical point or just telling the story for its own sake, in which case it is something else – it is not an easy thing to do. But people were really beginning to do that in the 90’s; and there was also the question: who had the permission to do that? Do you have to have tenure, for example? For me it comes out of feminist theory and understanding that the personal is the political and the personal is the scholarly. I believe in the embodied nature of scholarship. So, I am a great advocate of it but I don’t think that the autobiographical element is essential.

You know I was the editor of PMLA for the last three years, and I am reading a lot of scholarly work and mostly it is not at all autobiographical. I always look for the story of a mind working through a problem, even if I don’t know the personal story of that person; you really want to feel that scholarly work is grounded in some way in the world. That is what I would advocate. And I don’t think that I will always write like that, but I will always write about things that I care deeply about and in that sense, I will be in them.

JULIA K. BAKER (to MARIANNE HIRSCH): In your article "Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile" you wrote about your efforts to organize a trip for yourself and your parents back to Czernowitz, how you kept checking back with them, and how you finally found out that they really did not want to go. During your key-note-address on Thursday [“Strolling the Herrengasse: Street Photographs in Archival and Personal Memory,” held at the conference “Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts,” at Bowling Green State University, Ohio March 23, 2006], it was nice to learn that your parents apparently did eventually go back with you. I thought it was also interesting to see the photo you took of your parents in the Herrengasse. How does this photo (in which they are standing) compare to those that show them strolling the Herrengasse as a young couple? And, a more general question to both of you: How does your current book project fit into this idea of a return?

MARIANNE HIRSCH: That’s interesting. When we took the photo of them in 1998, I don’t think we were consciously thinking of all those other street photos, particularly. But somehow, through some lucky stroke, we took it around the same spot that they were taken by street photographers in the 1920’s, 30’s and early 40’s. The Herrengasse was a ‘Begriff,’ of course we went right there, and they told us about it; it was an obvious place to take a photo of my parents. Perhaps we were thinking of that little picture of them in the same spot in 1942, during the worst time of persecution, subliminally, because that picture was in the album, but we had not really investigated it or thought about it. Our link to it, in 1998, was just a subliminal pull.

LEO SPITZER: That photo, actually, was taken with a video camera. So we do have them walking on the Herrengasse as well. We can animate the photo.

JULIA K. BAKER (to MARIANNE HIRSCH): What do you think of your parents in the photo from 1998?

MARIANNE HIRSCH: Well, it is a completely different moment in their lives. Not only have they changed, but the place has changed as well. You can see it even in the photo, how quiet it is, how little street activity there is. It was much more lively in the 30’s, there were more stores, more people, more activity, and in 1998, it was a very quiet place. Then when we went back in 2000, it was more lively again. But yes, we went on that trip, it was probably related to my parents’ reading the article you mentioned and they said “I guess you really want to go.” And we also found out through other people that the trip was not as complicated as we had thought. It was a great trip, they loved it. We actually wrote an article about the trip, it is called “We would not have gone without you.”

JULIA K. BAKER (to LEO SPITZER): You turned the old photo of your parents to find the year in which it was taken. This process of turning the photo to find something so interesting and to make it the basis for a scholarly investigation, is something I found Prof. Spitzer also did in “The Album and the Crossing.” Didn’t you also turn a photo around and found something new and interesting? Have you come to turn all old photos around to look at their backsides? Could you reflect on that process? Do you think of yourself as detectives?

LEO SPITZER: Yes, that’s right, I first wrote about turning photos in a piece that subsequently became part of a chapter in Hotel Bolivia. There, I had been puzzled by a series of photos in an album that my parents had put together of their shipboard “crossing” from Europe to South America in 1939 – photos, in effect, of their forced emigration from Nazi Austria to Bolivia. There was a tremendous incongruity in those photos between what they appeared to depict – a relatively pleasant shipboard voyage aboard the Italian Line’s SS Virgilio, and the reality that they were in fact refugees who not only had just escaped the horrors of post-Anschluss Austria but who were also in mourning for my grandfather Leopold, who had died aboard the very ship on which they were traveling. It was only when I accidentally turned the photos over, after trying to remount and fix them more securely in the old album, that I found my father’s handwritten comments that totally contradicted the pleasant images the photos seemed to reflect. This clearly demonstrated what seems like an obvious point, but one very often missed: that when we “read” photos for the historical evidence they might provide, we need to read them not just for their indexicality – for their connection to something that stood before the camera lens in the past – but also for what they don’t show, or mask, or hide. In a sense, I guess, when we remain aware of that and try to read images beyond their frame and beyond the apparent, we are doing a form of detective work.

JULIA K. BAKER You are working on a book together. Are you going to do that again? Do you work well together?

LEO SPITZER: A book project is a big undertaking and I hope that we are reaching the conclusion of this project by the end of this year. It has been a rich and fascinating experience for me because Marianne and I have very different working styles. And in order to work together, we had to adjust our practices. I tend to be a slow writer. It has always been difficult for me to go on to a next sentence before I feel that the previous sentence is “right,” well written and reflective of my intent. When I complete a piece I don’t like to revise very much – I revise and revise again while I am in the process of creation. Marianne works much faster, completes more than I do in a session, and revises in subsequent drafts. I think that in the course of our collaboration, however, we have influenced each other, and we have managed to work out a writing practice that seems to work well and that leaves both of us satisfied. I feel very fortunate to be married to a partner with whom I enjoy collaborating intellectually, and to be immersed with her creatively in a project in which we share similar backgrounds, and to which we bring different disciplinary training. I am of course not from Czernowitz, the place we are writing about, nor is my family. Her family is from there. But I do have an Austrian-Habsburg background (Czernowitz was the capital of the Habsburg province of the Bukowina), and the experience of Jewish emancipation, assimilation, and emigration that is so central to the story of Czernowitz Jews is extremely familiar to me from both my work on Viennese Jews and from my own family history. In my work on Czernowitz, that historical and familial background has been incredibly influential. And for me personally, it has been a tremendous advantage to benefit from Marianne’s literary imagination and theoretical sophistication – to look at things in a different way, and to learn how to read documents and visual materials in a manner that is different from the way a historian might approach them. Collaboration has been a great and rich learning experience for me. When we finish this project, I look forward to working together again, perhaps not on such a large project, but on many more smaller ones.

MARIANNE HIRSCH: Yes, our work came together in our previous two books. I was working on family photography and Leo was working on Hotel Bolivia. And I am not sure whether he would have done so much with the photos if I had not looked at photos all the time. And my own work, until very recently, has not been particularly historically inflected. I just did not really know how to do that kind of research, and how to write historical narratives; as I told you, I was not really trained that way. I have learned to pay much more attention, and to learn. When we first started doing this, we were worried because we do have such different writing styles, but the adjustment has been great. It has been really exciting. I am not sure whether we will do another book together, but I am sure there will be articles and smaller pieces. And now we get invitations and we drag each other along and say, “do this with me.” Somehow it feels more reassuring and it is a lot more fun. So we do these presentations together. One of the biggest challenges in the book is the voice. As a genre, this book is a second-generation memoir. But the voice in a memoir cannot be “we,” so we had to solve that problem. We did it by writing different chapters in different first person voices - perhaps, a bit of a challenge for the reader, but most of the time it is really clear who is speaking.

JULIA K. BAKER (to LEO SPITZER): What does it mean to you that your book Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism was recently translated into German and published by an Austrian publishing house (Picus)?

LEO SPITZER: It has a great meaning to me. It still needs to be translated into Spanish. But to have it translated into German is very important. And to be published in Vienna and presented there for a public reading at a well-publicized conference – I wish my parents had been alive to see the book in German, they would have been really pleased. Personally, I love the translation, it is a very good translation. And the book looks good in the German edition. I feel that it is important that the book exists in Vienna and am very happy that it is being sold there.

MARIANNE HIRSCH: Its translation and publication there was a sort of reparation for you.

JULIA K. BAKER (to MARIANNE HIRSCH): What are your thoughts about the effect the word “postmemory” has had on academia? Do you welcome people’s interpretations and expansions of the term? Yesterday, during a panel, you were repeatedly quoted (and it is always the same quote) and in your response, I sensed that you were slightly amused but also a bit irritated. Have you come across something/someone particularly productive in the context of the expansion of your ideas? Does it sometimes bother you that people are using your ideas to such great extent?

MARIANNE HIRSCH: I wish it was not always the same quote! Somehow I had no idea, you know, I wrote this book on family photographs and there were a number of terms I tried to define there. All kinds of gazes and looks; I thought that that would be the thing that people would pick up from the book. I defined ‘postmemory’ as best as I could through the examples I had, but then in subsequent articles I have continued to define it and redefine it and have tried to be more specific but unfortunately those have not come out in a book yet. So then everybody comes back to that one quote, which I still don’t disagree with, but I recently have written a piece trying to lay out precisely how I think postmemory works. I also respond to a number of critiques that I have seen. No, I am not irritated, you know, obviously it is useful to people and it has enabled some really important and interesting work by scholars and artists. And I have questions about it too, you know, people ask me as though I were the ultimate memory authority and obviously I have been wondering about it too: Does it apply to different situations, different traumata, do children of perpetrators also have postmemory? Is it limited to trauma in the first place? How do individual and group experiences relate to each other? Lots of questions. These are questions I keep thinking about and I am actually grateful that other people are thinking about them as well. Now I am trying to define my understanding of postmemory very carefully because you never know how your work is going to come back to you. At this point, I think it has a life of its own and people do what they want to do with it. I can’t control it. I can only try to respond and those responses will hopefully take it further.

JULIA K. BAKER: In After Such Knowledge Eva Hofmann writes: “The story of the second generation is, above all, a strong example of an internalized past, of the way in which atrocity literally reverberates through the minds and lives of subsequent generations. That is the way the story is usually told: as personal, affective, intricately psychological. But the Holocaust past, aside from being a profound personal legacy, is also a task. It demands something from us, an understanding that is larger than just ourselves, that moves beyond the private vicissitudes of the inner life.” (103) Do you agree that the Holocaust is a task, and if yes, what is your task?

MARIANNE HIRSCH: The way that question is generally answered, is with the phrase “Never again.” At this point in our history, however, it is clear that there have been other genocides and that, as mass murder and genocide repeats, it has a compounding traumatic effect on our collective history and cultural identity. Memory of atrocity does not prevent atrocity. What does it do? The Holocaust has been used as a paradigm for memory and memorialization of massive violence and of cultural and collective trauma. The task, I believe, now, is to examine this role carefully, to insist on historical specificity, not to allow the enormity of one event to obscure the seriousness of others.

JULIA K. BAKER: This is a question I ask for graduate students who working towards a career in academia. On a scale from 1-10, how much do you enjoy your job? What is great about it? What is not so great? What is your message to your colleagues in the profession, experienced ones, and those who are at the beginning of their careers?

LEO SPITZER: As in any profession, there are good days and there are bad ones – and my response to your scaled question would probably depend on the occasion. For the most, however, I love my job and feel privileged to be a teacher and historian, and to have a job that actually pays me to do research, read, write, think and be creative. And, given my international and comparative interests, it also supports my research and my participation in conferences all over the world. What more can one ask? A 10 in that respect. Of course I would be dishonest if I told you I love to grade student papers and enjoy reading student exams. And yes, there are stressful occasions: deadlines, too many commitments, and too little time to chill out. Nonetheless, for colleagues young and old, I would underscore the positive about what we do both as teachers and scholar/writers – the intellectual excitement, creativity, and joyful collaborative exploration of ideas that our profession enables and, for the most part sustains.

MARIANNE HIRSCH: I love my job, probably 10 a lot of the time. Of course there are tedious aspects to it, like in any job. Often it’s hard. I mostly take on too much and am stressed about getting it done. But -- I get to do what I most like to do -- read, talk with friends, colleagues, students about what I read, think about things, try to make a difference. I’d say to colleagues, work on things you are really passionate about, not on things you think others will consider important or impressive. Don’t teach or write anything that you are not genuinely curious about yourself.

JULIA K. BAKER What would you ask each other if you were conducting an interview with each other?

MARIANNE HIRSCH: What unique contributions has your work made to the field of history?

LEO SPITZER: Whose turn is it to have the last word…?



Marianne Hirsch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University where she also has an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She was born in Romania, and educated at Brown University where she received her BA/MA and Ph.D. degrees. Before moving to Columbia, she taught at Dartmouth College for many years, most recently as the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities. Her recent publications include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), The Familial Gaze (ed.1999), Time and the Literary (co-ed.2002), a special issue of Signs on "Gender and Cultural Memory" (co-ed. 2002), and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (co-ed. 2004). Over the last few years, she has also published numerous articles on cultural memory, visuality and gender, particularly on the representation of World War Two and the Holocaust in literature, testimony and photography. Currently, she is writing a book with Leo Spitzer Ghosts of Home : Czernowitz and the Holocaust. She is the editor of PMLA and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, the National Humanities Center, and the Bellagio and Bogliasco Foundations. She has served on the MLA Executive Council, the ACLA Advisory Board, the Board of Supervisors of The English Institute, and the Executive Board of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.


Leo Spitzer
Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History
Department of History
Dartmouth College

His teaching a publishing interests range widely — from questions concerning emancipation and reactions to exclusion and domination in Latin America, Africa, and Central Europe, to issues of historical memory, refugeehood, and representations of the Holocaust in film and video. His most recent book, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), was recently translated into German and published in Vienna by Picus Verlag. He is also the author of Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (Cambridge, 1990; 2nd ed. 1999, Hill & Wang; trans. Vidas de Entremeio, UERJ, 2002), The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism (Wisconsin 1974, Ife Press 1976), and is co-editor of Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (UPNE, 1999). He is currently working in collaboration with Marianne Hirsch on a book, Ghosts of Home: Czernowitz and the Holocaust. He is also co-editing with Ilan Stavans, Against Oblivion: Latin America and the Holocaust.


Julia K. Baker recently completed a Ph.D. in the German Studies Department at the University of Cincinnati.