‘Timeless places’ – Narratives about flight, exile and belonging
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.31863Keywords:
chronotope, discourse-historical approach, Holocaust, network analysis, refugee, scenic story genreAbstract
In this paper, I present some results of an interdisciplinary (psychological, historical, discourse-analytical) research project on narratives of persecution, flight and survival. These stories told by the children (and grandchildren) of Austrian victims of Nazi persecution, all of them left-wing political dissidents and some of them also Jewish, relate to World War II and the Holocaust. In their narratives, the interviewees try to come to terms with the experiences of their parents (and grandparents) and bridge the obvious cognitive dissonance of living in Austria and holding a citizenship which was denied to their elders at a traumatic point of their parents' lives. Firstly, I focus on the narratives as they relate to flight and the loss of citizenship and homes. Secondly, I investigate what it meant - from the children's perspective - to later return to and grow up in the country that had excluded their parents. And thirdly, I reflect on what such stories imply for the present and future and what we can learn from them. In the analysis, I integrate quantitative methods (narrative network analysis and corpus linguistics) with qualitative discourse analysis. Although each story and the related context are of course unique, it is nevertheless worth discussing if specific characteristics of the narratives could be generalised to other contexts in order to illustrate the plights of fleeing refugees and their struggles for survival.
References
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Bamberg, M. (1997) Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1–4): 335–342. https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.7.42pos
Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (1990) Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.19.100190.000423
Baynham, M. (2005) Network and agency in the migration stories of Moroccan women. In M. Baynham and A. De Fina (eds) Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement, 11–35. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Berger, E. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2018) Kinder der Rückkehr. Geschichte einer marginalisierten Jugend. Berlin: Springer.
Candlin, C. (1990) What happens when applied linguistics goes critical? In M. A. K. Halliday, J. Gibbons and N. Howards (eds) Learning, Keeping and Using Language, Volume 2, 461–470. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.lkul2.32can
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De Fina, A. (2003b) Identity in Narrative: A study of Immigrant Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.3
De Fina, A. and Georgakopoulou, A. (2012) Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Delanty, G. and Kumar, K. (2006) Introduction. In G. Delanty and K. Kumar (eds) The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism, 1–4. London: Sage.
Delanty, G., Wodak, R. and Jones, P. (eds) (2011) Identity, Belonging and Migration. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846314537
Halbwachs, M. (1985) Das kollektive Gedächtnis. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hanauer, D. (2017) The discursive construction of the Stolper Steine Memorial Project: Official, educational and familial meanings, In D. Seymour and M. Camino (eds) Contested/Contesting Memories of the Holocaust, 263–276. London: Routledge.
Heer, H., Manoschek, W., Pollak, A. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2008) The Discursive Construction of History: Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hirsch, M. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kellermann, N. N. (2011) ‘Geerbtes Trauma’ – Die Konzeptualisierung der trans-generationellen Weitergabe von Traumata. Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 39: 137–160.
KhosraviNik, M. (2010) The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers: A critical discourse analysis. Journal of Language and Politics 9 (1): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.9.1.01kho
Knight, R. (1988) ‘Ich bin dafür, die Sache in die Länge zu ziehen.’ Die Wortprotokolle der Österreichischen Bundesregierung von 1945–1952 über die Entschädigung der Juden. Frankfurt: Fischer.
Koselleck, R. (2002) The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
Krzy?anowski, M. and Wodak, R. (2009) Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press.
Labov, W. and Waletzky, J. (1967) Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (ed.) Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Laub, D. and Allard, M. (1998) History, memory, and truth: Defining the place of the survivor. In B. Peck and A. Peck (eds) The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, 799–813. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mudde, C. (2007) Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492037
Musolff, A. (2010) Metaphor, Nation, and the Holocaust. London: Routledge.
Norocel, O. C. (2013) Our People – A Tight-Knit Family Under the Same Protective Roof. Helsinki: Unigrafia.
Ono, K. A. (2012) Borders that travel: Matters of the figurative border, in R. D. DeChaine (ed.) Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexican Frontier, 19–32. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2015) The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In. R. Wodak amd M. Meyer (eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (3rd revised and extended Edition), 23–61. London: Sage.
Rheindorf, M. and Wodak, R. (2015) Narrative Analyse von Fluchterzählungen. Unpublished project report, Vienna.
Rheindorf, M. and Wodak, R. (2018) Borders, fences, and limits – Protecting Austria from refugees: Meta-discursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16 (1–2): 15–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1302032
Schiffrin, D. (1997) The transformation of experience, identity, and context. In G. R. Guy, C. Feagin, D. Schiffrin and John Baugh (eds) Towards a Social Science of Language: Papers in Honor of William Labov, Volume 2: Social Interaction and Discourse Structures, 41–55. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.128.06sch
Schiffrin, D. (2002) Mother and friends in a Holocaust life story. Language in Society 31: 309–353. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404502020250
Schiffrin, D. (2003) We knew that’s it: Retelling the turning point of a narrative. Discourse Studies 5 (4): 535–561. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456030054005
Schiffrin, D. (2006) In other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511616273
Schröter, M. (2013) Silence and Concealment in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.48
Triandafyllidou, A. (2018) A ‘refugee crisis’ unfolding: ‘Real’ events and their interpretation in media and political debates. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16 (1–2): 198–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1309089
Van Dijk, T. A. (1992) Discourse and the denial of racism. Discourse & Society 3 (1): 87–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926592003001005
Van Dijk, T. A. (2009) Semantic macro-structures and knowledge frames in discourse comprehension. In M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter (eds) Cognitive Processes in Comprehension, 3–32. New York: Psychology Press.
Welzer, H. (2010) Re-narrations: How pasts change in conversational remembering. Memory Studies 3 (10): 5–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698009348279
Wodak, R. (1986) Language Behavior in Therapy Groups. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Wodak, R. (2011) Suppression of the Nazi past, coded languages, and discourses of silence: Applying the discourse-historical approach to post-war antisemitism in Austria. In W. Steinmetz (ed.) Political Language in the Age of Extremes, 351–379. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wodak, R. (2015) The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446270073
Wodak, R. (2017) The ‘Establishment’, the ‘Élites’, and the ‘People’: Who’s who? Journal of Language and Politics 16 (4): 471–484. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17042.krz
Wodak, R. (2018a) Discourses about nationalism. In J. Flowerdew and J. E Richardson
(eds) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, 403–420. London: Routledge.
Wodak, R. (2018b) ‘Strangers in Europe’: A discourse-historical approach to the legitimation of immigration control 2015/16. In S. Zhao, E. Djonov, A. Björkvall and M. Boeriis (eds) Advancing Multimodal and Critical Discourse Studies: Interdisciplinary Research inspired by Theo van Leeuwen’s Social Semiotics, 31–50. London: Routledge.
Wodak, R. and Boukala, S. (2015) European identities and the revival of nationalism in the European Union – A discourse-historical approach. Journal of Language & Politics 14 (1): 87–129. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.1.05wod
Wodak R., Nowak, P., Pelikan, J., Gruber, H., De Cilia, R. and Mitten. R. (1990) ‘Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter’: Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Wodak, R. and Rheindorf, M. (2017) ‘Whose story?’ Narratives of persecution, flight and survival told by children of Austrian Holocaust survivors. In A. De Fina, D. Ikizoglu and J. Wegner (eds) Diversity and Super-Diversity: Sociocultural Linguistic Perspectives, 37–64. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Wortham, S. (2001) Narratives in Action. A Strategy for Research and Analysis. New York: Teachers College Press.
Zappavigna, M. (2013) Tacit Knowledge and Spoken Discourse. London: Bloomsbury.
Ziegler, M. and Kannonier-Finster, W. (1997) Österreichisches Gedächtnis. Über Erinnern und Vergessen der NS-Vergangenheit. Vienna: Böhlau.
Assmann, A. (2009) From collective violence to a common future: Four models for dealing with a traumatic past. In R. Wodak and G. Auer-Boreo (eds) Memory and Justice, 31–48. Vienna: Passagen.
Assmann, A. (2011) To remember or to forget: Which way out of a shared history of violence? In A. Assman and L. Shortt (eds) Memory and Political Change, 53–71. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bamberg, M. (1997) Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1–4): 335–342. https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.7.42pos
Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (1990) Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.19.100190.000423
Baynham, M. (2005) Network and agency in the migration stories of Moroccan women. In M. Baynham and A. De Fina (eds) Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement, 11–35. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Berger, E. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2018) Kinder der Rückkehr. Geschichte einer marginalisierten Jugend. Berlin: Springer.
Candlin, C. (1990) What happens when applied linguistics goes critical? In M. A. K. Halliday, J. Gibbons and N. Howards (eds) Learning, Keeping and Using Language, Volume 2, 461–470. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.lkul2.32can
De Fina, A. (2003a) Crossing borders: Time, space, and disorientation in narrative. Narrative Inquiry 13 (2): 367–391. https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.13.2.08def
De Fina, A. (2003b) Identity in Narrative: A study of Immigrant Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.3
De Fina, A. and Georgakopoulou, A. (2012) Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Delanty, G. and Kumar, K. (2006) Introduction. In G. Delanty and K. Kumar (eds) The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism, 1–4. London: Sage.
Delanty, G., Wodak, R. and Jones, P. (eds) (2011) Identity, Belonging and Migration. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846314537
Halbwachs, M. (1985) Das kollektive Gedächtnis. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hanauer, D. (2017) The discursive construction of the Stolper Steine Memorial Project: Official, educational and familial meanings, In D. Seymour and M. Camino (eds) Contested/Contesting Memories of the Holocaust, 263–276. London: Routledge.
Heer, H., Manoschek, W., Pollak, A. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2008) The Discursive Construction of History: Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hirsch, M. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kellermann, N. N. (2011) ‘Geerbtes Trauma’ – Die Konzeptualisierung der trans-generationellen Weitergabe von Traumata. Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 39: 137–160.
KhosraviNik, M. (2010) The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers: A critical discourse analysis. Journal of Language and Politics 9 (1): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.9.1.01kho
Knight, R. (1988) ‘Ich bin dafür, die Sache in die Länge zu ziehen.’ Die Wortprotokolle der Österreichischen Bundesregierung von 1945–1952 über die Entschädigung der Juden. Frankfurt: Fischer.
Koselleck, R. (2002) The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
Krzy?anowski, M. and Wodak, R. (2009) Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press.
Labov, W. and Waletzky, J. (1967) Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (ed.) Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Laub, D. and Allard, M. (1998) History, memory, and truth: Defining the place of the survivor. In B. Peck and A. Peck (eds) The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, 799–813. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mudde, C. (2007) Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492037
Musolff, A. (2010) Metaphor, Nation, and the Holocaust. London: Routledge.
Norocel, O. C. (2013) Our People – A Tight-Knit Family Under the Same Protective Roof. Helsinki: Unigrafia.
Ono, K. A. (2012) Borders that travel: Matters of the figurative border, in R. D. DeChaine (ed.) Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexican Frontier, 19–32. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2015) The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In. R. Wodak amd M. Meyer (eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (3rd revised and extended Edition), 23–61. London: Sage.
Rheindorf, M. and Wodak, R. (2015) Narrative Analyse von Fluchterzählungen. Unpublished project report, Vienna.
Rheindorf, M. and Wodak, R. (2018) Borders, fences, and limits – Protecting Austria from refugees: Meta-discursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16 (1–2): 15–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1302032
Schiffrin, D. (1997) The transformation of experience, identity, and context. In G. R. Guy, C. Feagin, D. Schiffrin and John Baugh (eds) Towards a Social Science of Language: Papers in Honor of William Labov, Volume 2: Social Interaction and Discourse Structures, 41–55. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.128.06sch
Schiffrin, D. (2002) Mother and friends in a Holocaust life story. Language in Society 31: 309–353. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404502020250
Schiffrin, D. (2003) We knew that’s it: Retelling the turning point of a narrative. Discourse Studies 5 (4): 535–561. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456030054005
Schiffrin, D. (2006) In other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511616273
Schröter, M. (2013) Silence and Concealment in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.48
Triandafyllidou, A. (2018) A ‘refugee crisis’ unfolding: ‘Real’ events and their interpretation in media and political debates. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16 (1–2): 198–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1309089
Van Dijk, T. A. (1992) Discourse and the denial of racism. Discourse & Society 3 (1): 87–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926592003001005
Van Dijk, T. A. (2009) Semantic macro-structures and knowledge frames in discourse comprehension. In M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter (eds) Cognitive Processes in Comprehension, 3–32. New York: Psychology Press.
Welzer, H. (2010) Re-narrations: How pasts change in conversational remembering. Memory Studies 3 (10): 5–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698009348279
Wodak, R. (1986) Language Behavior in Therapy Groups. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Wodak, R. (2011) Suppression of the Nazi past, coded languages, and discourses of silence: Applying the discourse-historical approach to post-war antisemitism in Austria. In W. Steinmetz (ed.) Political Language in the Age of Extremes, 351–379. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wodak, R. (2015) The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446270073
Wodak, R. (2017) The ‘Establishment’, the ‘Élites’, and the ‘People’: Who’s who? Journal of Language and Politics 16 (4): 471–484. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17042.krz
Wodak, R. (2018a) Discourses about nationalism. In J. Flowerdew and J. E Richardson
(eds) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, 403–420. London: Routledge.
Wodak, R. (2018b) ‘Strangers in Europe’: A discourse-historical approach to the legitimation of immigration control 2015/16. In S. Zhao, E. Djonov, A. Björkvall and M. Boeriis (eds) Advancing Multimodal and Critical Discourse Studies: Interdisciplinary Research inspired by Theo van Leeuwen’s Social Semiotics, 31–50. London: Routledge.
Wodak, R. and Boukala, S. (2015) European identities and the revival of nationalism in the European Union – A discourse-historical approach. Journal of Language & Politics 14 (1): 87–129. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.1.05wod
Wodak R., Nowak, P., Pelikan, J., Gruber, H., De Cilia, R. and Mitten. R. (1990) ‘Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter’: Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Wodak, R. and Rheindorf, M. (2017) ‘Whose story?’ Narratives of persecution, flight and survival told by children of Austrian Holocaust survivors. In A. De Fina, D. Ikizoglu and J. Wegner (eds) Diversity and Super-Diversity: Sociocultural Linguistic Perspectives, 37–64. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Wortham, S. (2001) Narratives in Action. A Strategy for Research and Analysis. New York: Teachers College Press.
Zappavigna, M. (2013) Tacit Knowledge and Spoken Discourse. London: Bloomsbury.
Ziegler, M. and Kannonier-Finster, W. (1997) Österreichisches Gedächtnis. Über Erinnern und Vergessen der NS-Vergangenheit. Vienna: Böhlau.
Published
2018-12-31
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Articles
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Equinox Publishing Ltd.
How to Cite
Wodak, R. (2018). ‘Timeless places’ – Narratives about flight, exile and belonging. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, 13(1-3), 343-367. https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.31863
