Back to Search
Start Over
The ethics of retelling: the moral extremity of forgiveness in Helga Schneider’s Let Me Go
- Source :
- Laboratoire Italien, Vol 24 (2020)
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- École Normale Supérieure de Lyon Editions, 2020.
-
Abstract
- Helga Schneider’s Let me go reveals the ethical burden that an author invariably feels in the retelling of private events. Often, literary representations of lacerating family dynamics expose the role of history in the rupture of intimate ties between their members. Narratives juxtapose the private aspects of the family story with the public events that partly shaped such dynamics. In Let me go, Schneider lays bare such intersections, and makes visible the impact of history upon her own existence. She is an indirect witness to the Holocaust, a position due to her own mother’s proactive participation in the project of Endlösung of the Jews of Europe. A larger sense of morality involving her role in the killing of innocent ones takes over any possible attempt the daughter might pursue at making amends for her old mother. As the memoir is a published body of writing, readers are involved as jury in the written stage of another public trial to an unapologetic war criminal, Traudi Schneider. The daughter Helga decrees the fate of her protagonist’s reception by probing her culpability with terrible evidences. In this trial, fiction is crueler than reality as facts are sustained by ineluctable proofs of her guilt for which there can’t be forgiveness.
- Subjects :
- forgiveness
shame
guilt
mother-daughter
feelings
Levi (Primo)
Social Sciences
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- French, Italian
- ISSN :
- 16279204
- Volume :
- 24
- Database :
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Journal :
- Laboratoire Italien
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- edsdoj.b1622ec5de88499e9610d05bc33b8249
- Document Type :
- article
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.4000/laboratoireitalien.4641