Hannah Stone
hannahstone@g.harvard.edu
When Hannah Arendt visited Berlin in 1950, she diagnosed Germany with an “inability to mourn” the devastating losses of the second world war and the Holocaust. Since then, German memory culture has transformed significantly from an early suppression of remembrance to a “memory boom” in the wake of the country’s reunification. These developments notwithstanding, the discourse on the “inability to mourn” never fully disappeared, finding new articulations amidst political and social transformations in the 2000s. This talk takes up the long discourse on the German inability to grieve and pairs it with insights from Simone Stirner’s forthcoming book, Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism, a comparative study that advances a new understanding of post-Holocaust poetry by centering the relation between poetic form and the affective experience of grief. To confront the force of grief in poetry, this talk argues, allows us to rethink its place in cultures of remembrance, to see where it has been repressed and instrumentalized, and to create openings that respond to what cannot be contained and conceptualized about loss.
LOCATION:CGIS South, Huguette and Michel Porté Seminar Room (250) STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260330T220000Z DTEND:20260330T233000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR