Mauthausen Matters

Embodied Remembrance and Public Performance in Violated Spaces, jour fixe culture studies with Rebecca Rovit

‘Do we have an ethical responsibility toward “violated spaces” like those of a former concentration camp? What legacy do such spaces create for us? I explore Mauthausen as a site of remembrance, connected to past violence that saturated Austrian soil. I draw on experiential and intergenerational aspects of memory based on a group excursion to the former camp memorial with students from the University of Vienna. As active participants at memorial sites like Mauthausen we negotiate place as we move within given and created spaces. In my ethnographic analysis I point to the reflexivity of performative behavior and the relationship between natural and public space and remembrance at the former camp as we “walked” the land that commanded our attention. I examine too how cultural and international differences may alter our embodied perceptions of the Mauthausen memorial. As the gap widens between the “lived memory” of the Shoah and our present, how do we maintain the urgency of remembrance for later generations? My presentation on Mauthausen taps questions of witness and healing; remembering and forgetting; and presence and erasure in our 21st century as I consider how we embody remembrance and commemorate the Holocaust past.’ Rebecca Rovit

Rebecca Rovit is a Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Kansas and a Fulbright alumna scholar to Austria (2019; 2016-17). Her new book project “Theatre from the Rubble of War: Cultural Crossings in Vienna and Berlin, 1945-1955” is under contract with in Palgrave Macmillan’s series on Transnational Theatre Histories.

Chair: Zuzanna Dziuban