Memory as Part of an Event, and Events as Signification of Memories: Focusing on Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report
Abstract
:1. Introduction: From Memory Studies to Event Studies
Wagner-Pacifici intentionally aims to engender a provocative re-examination of the overall memory studies project, expanding the debate with a scathing criticism that memory studies or collective memory studies rely on a “fundamental misrecognition”, a confusion between memory and the original event under study. She argues that what we commonly study as memory, such as “the memorial, the speech, and the museum” are merely “provisionally congealed moments of the events themselves” (Wagner-Pacifici 2016, p. 23).Perhaps the most pervasive assumption is that memory concerns itself with the aftermath, after-effects, or afterlife of precipitating and causative events (even as the ontological status of the events themselves may be questioned). Memories are understood to occupy a meaningful distance (although spatial and temporal distances vary materially and symbolically) from actual events that have, essentially, ended. This distance can come in several forms: temporal, spatial, cognitive, emotional, and experiential. But while memory studies often articulate the ways that, for example, event-precipitated trauma can continue, the event itself is over.
Based on this point, Wagner-Pacifici argues that instead of applying a sharp dichotomy between the event itself and subsequent memory of the event, as typically identified in general memory studies, we should view memory not as static but as a dynamic process of ‘memorialization’, and thus as a part and piece of the event itself, because events only gain coherence through subsequent reflection and contemplation. Of course, this argument is not novel in itself, as many studies on events have already pointed out that memory and event can be used interchangeably in the special form called ‘crisis’.While events do have both inchoative and terminative aspects, … they can never be determined to have ended once and for all. So, for example, … the 9/11 Memorial and Museum are part of the event of 9/11, one of its myriad shapes or forms, incorporating the massive police presence protecting the fountains, security apparatus, and arduous forms of ingress for the public. … the event “9/11” only takes shape, becomes coherent, insofar as it moves beyond the initial stage of incoherence, rupture, and surprise. And it does take shape—as laws, wars, policies, police presence, and museums and memorials. Thus memory, whatever else it is, is part of the event itself as it lives on in intermittently tamped down and restless modes. Movement and form are both dynamic elements in the existence of the event, as events are both structured and fluid. … we must grasp their mobility, their provisional form taking, and their restlessness. Assessing the nature and capacities of the forms in which events live and through which they move is an alternative and, I would argue, more fruitful way of understanding the relationships between memory and social and cultural mediations.
In What Is an Event?, she argues that events erupt in surprising ways, and then take shape and flow. Unlike how we remember events, they do not clearly begin at one point and end at another in a narrative-like manner. Events are bound to undergo constant transformation because they live and breathe in different ‘forms and flows’.Memory studies or collective memory studies, typically concentrating on museums, monuments, memorials, and political speeches, manage to absorb their original precipitating events by declaring them finished. They have done so largely through the aegis of analyzing objects that anchor events in space and time—monumental stones, ruins, memorials, inquisitional hearings, and commemorations. In the alternative approach being developed in this study, the memorial, the speech, the stone, the museum, are understood as only provisionally congealed moments of the events themselves, with variable shaping impacts on them.
Wagner-Pacifici’s approach to events fundamentally changes how we conceptualize the past, thereby enabling a new way of thinking about memory as well. It also provides useful insights for explaining the grounds and background of events, the moment and form of event rupture, and further, the process by which events settle or resist settlement. How can we verify this? We will attempt to validate the legitimacy of the shift from memory studies to event studies by applying Wagner-Pacifici’s understanding of events to the Holocaust, more precisely, by applying it to the analysis of works classified as Holocaust literature.This study takes seriously the phrase “events take shape”. Executive orders, letters, trials, handshakes, newspaper articles, photographs, and paintings are simultaneously the concrete material and the formal hosts for the relay of actions and codifications that get identified as events. Events live in and through these forms. Events are also mobile—relentlessly so. The handoffs from one form to the next keep events alive. These are actions that proceed in diverse modalities across diverse domains.
2. The Ontology of Event in Brodeck’s Report
2.1. The Narrative Structure of Brodeck’s Report
Of course, during Brodeck’s investigation, it became apparent that the incident, although without physical evidence, was a collective crime orchestrated by the entire village. Brodeck decided to write an unofficial report containing the hidden truth he had discovered, in addition to the official report he was requested to produce. This hidden report, appearing in the novel, is ‘Brodeck’s Report’, written from Brodeck’s first-person protagonist perspective. It is essentially a memoir recording everything Brodeck himself experienced, remembered, and contemplated before and after the ‘Anderer murder case’ in the process of writing the hidden report (the ongoing ‘Brodeck event’ from past to present). The official report, written for administrative purposes and under coercion, was narrated to be factual, chronological, and clearly causal, like an official history book. Of course, it was written to serve the interests of the villagers who commissioned it. In contrast, the hidden Brodeck’s Report on Anderer’s death and Brodeck’s life appears fragmented, filled with metatextual annotations about its production process (i.e., Brodeck’s own stories), and oscillating between various temporal levels.“All right,” (…) “I’ll tell the story—that is, I’ll try. I promise you I’m going to try. I’ll write in the first person, I’ll say ‘I’ the way I do in my reports, because I don’t know how to tell a story any other way, but I warn you, that’s going to mean everyone. Everyone, you understand me? I’ll say ‘I’ but it’ll be like saying the whole village and all the hamlets around it, in other words, all of us. All right?”
2.2. The Anderer and Brodeck: The Overlapping Life Trajectories of Two Strangers
This man began a long-term stay at the inn of Schloss, the village’s largest café, which also served as a tavern where the villagers gathered. The villagers could not understand why this man with a plump belly had come to their village or what he was doing there. Even until the end, no one knew his name. It is said that once when the mayor asked for his name, he did not answer. So, in his report, Brodeck simply called him ‘De Anderer’ from the beginning. It simply means ‘the Other’ (Autre). Not only had he arrived unexpectedly, but he was also unique, a trait Brodeck was well acquainted with; at times, Brodeck must confess that he felt as though Anderer was a reflection of himself.“… there he was, a creature in the shape of a man, with his two beasts which I couldn’t tell what they were, there he was, coming toward the village on that very same road. He could only have come from over there, from the Fratergekeime, those shit-assed sons of infected old whores.”
Here, the term Fremdër can be seen as an analogy for not only Jews but all Nazi crimes or Hitlerite crimes victims, including people with disabilities, Romani (or Sinti), partisans, homosexuals, and others. The incident that student Brodeck experienced in the capital S. during the ‘Night of Purification’ or ‘Kristallnacht’ foreshadowed his harrowing Holocaust experience, which will be vividly described later. The war sent Brodeck and other Jews to a concentration camp. They treated him like a ‘dog’ there. The inmates were forced to say “ICH BIN NICHTS” in the language of the Fratergekeime (Germans), “Je ne suis rien” in French, and “I am nothing” in English.But when I asked him about some of my very favorite places, Kelmar usually replied that he hadn’t seen them for at least three years, ever since the day when he and all those designated as Fremdër were confined to the old part of the Capital, which had been transformed into a ghetto.
The sentence “I am Nothingness” (translated by Japanese sociologist Masachi Osawa) is a crucial clue in interpreting Brodeck’s Report (Osawa 2015, p. 211). Claudel used Victor Hugo’s quote “I’m nothing, I know it, but my nothing comprises a little bit of everything” as an epigraph, dedicating this novel “For all those who think they’re nothing”. Brodeck barely survived because he was in a forced labor camp (Arbeitslager) aimed at punishment, reformation, and labor, rather than an extermination camp (Vernichtungslager). He returned to the village as a ‘Holocaust survivor’, having just barely managed to stay alive. The villagers, who had not expected Brodeck to return alive, were shocked to see him.His skinny chest bore a placard, on which someone had written in their language, the language of the Fratergekeime (which in the old days was the double of our dialect, its twin sister), ICH BIN NICHTS, “I am nothing.”
The reason Brodeck was sent to a concentration camp is as follows: During the war, Nazi German troops invaded and occupied the village. They were initially quite gentlemanly, and the villagers even welcomed the Nazi forces. However, the Nazi commander ordered the villagers to hand over any ‘outsiders’ among them. Prior to this, the Nazi occupying forces had instilled fear in the villagers by publicly beheading one of the villagers who had been defiant to their orders. The influential group responsible for making important decisions in the village, known as ‘the Brotherhood of the Awakening’, held a secret meeting and decided to offer Brodeck and another man to the Nazis as ‘foreigners’.On June 10, the day of the Schoppessenwass in honor of the Anderer, everyone in the village and quite a few people from outside gathered in the market square and waited in front of the little platform Zungfrost had built. As I’ve said, it had been a long time since I’d gazed upon such a dense concentration of humanity in so restricted a space. I saw only merry, laughing, peaceful folk, but I couldn’t help thinking about the crowds I’d seen back in the days when the Capital was seized by madness, right before Pürische Nacht, and with that thought in mind, I perceived the tranquil countenances around me as masks hiding bloody faces, constantly open mouths, demented eyes.
Diodemus, one of the members of the Brotherhood of the Awakening, was Brodeck’s close friend. Unable to bear the guilt, he died by suicide shortly after the Anderer’s murder. Brodeck, who inherited his friend’s desk, discovers a lengthy letter hidden by Diodemus while writing his report. The letter contained an apology for handing Brodeck over to the Nazis. Upon reading this, Brodeck felt neither anger, hatred, nor joy—nothing at all. The letter also included a list of conspirators, but Brodeck did not read it to the end and instead burned the letter.“This is the fate of those who wish to play games with us. Think about it, villagers! Ladies and gentlemen, think about it! And in order to assist your reflections, the head and the body of this Fremdër will remain here! Burial is forbidden under pain of suffering a similar punishment! And one further word of advice: Cleanse your village! Do not wait for us to do it ourselves. Cleanse it while there’s still time!”
One day, as a gesture of gratitude to the village that had welcomed him, the Anderer hosts a party and exhibition at the Schloss’s inn where he was staying, inviting all the villagers. The dining room was adorned with portraits of each villager and several landscape paintings depicting various parts of the village. During his three-month stay, the Anderer had been continuously creating these artworks. Upon seeing these depictions of themselves, the villagers became greatly agitated. As if seized by collective madness, they destroyed all the paintings. The following day, Mayor Orschwir, representing the village, demanded that the Anderer leave, but he paid no heed. A few days later, the Anderer’s horse and donkey were found drowned in the river, their legs bound. The Anderer was distraught and lamented. Two days after this incident, the event, the tragedy, the accident—or as Brodeck calls it, the ‘Ereigniës’—occurred at the inn where the Anderer was staying. It is portrayed that most of the village men, except for Brodeck, participated in the murder.Why did I tell him, whom I knew not at all, things I’d never confessed to anyone? No doubt I needed to talk more than I was willing to admit, even to myself; I needed to relieve the burden that was weighing down my heart. … He wasn’t part of our history. He wasn’t part of History. He came out of nowhere, and today, when there’s no more trace of him, it’s as if he never existed. So what better person for me to tell my story to? He wasn’t on any side.
After his meeting with the mayor, Brodeck decided to leave the village with his three women. Although Brodeck had uncovered the reasons for the Anderer’s murder, his own deportation to the concentration camp, and Amelia’s descent into madness, he realized he could no longer live with the mayor—who insisted on forgetting, claiming that memory was dangerous, and declared the event closed—and the villagers who supported him. When Brodeck left the village and looked back, he found that the village had already vanished.“It’s time to forget, Brodeck. People need to forget.” … “There’s nothing left, nothing at all. Are you any unhappier?” “You burned a stack of paper. You didn’t burn what’s in my head!” “You’re right, it was only paper, but that paper contained everything the village wants to forget—and will forget. Everyone’s not like you, Brodeck.”
2.3. Why Did They (Have To) Kill the Anderer?
The portrait the Anderer had composed was, so to speak, alive. It was my life. It confronted me with myself, with my sorrows, my follies, my fears, my desires. I saw my extinguished childhood, my long months in the camp. I saw my homecoming. I saw my mute Amelia. I saw everything. The drawing was an opaque mirror that threw back into my face all that I’d been and all that I was.
The portraits and landscapes painted by the Anderer served as mirrors reflecting, without omission, the lives of each individual and the history of the village. Any unsavory secrets of the village and its inhabitants were exposed through these paintings. Upon closer inspection of the Anderer’s artwork, what initially appeared ordinary would suddenly come to life, and the portrayed faces “told of secrets, of torments, of heinousness, of mistakes, of confusion, of baseness” of each villager.And then there were the landscapes! That doesn’t seem like much, a landscape. It has nothing to say. At best, it sends us back to ourselves, nothing more. But there, as sketched by the Anderer, landscapes could talk. They recounted their history. They carried traces of what they had known. They bore witness to events that had unfolded there. In the church square, on the ground, an ink stain, located in the very spot where the execution of Aloïs Cathor had taken place, evoked all the blood that had flowed out of his beheaded body, and in the same drawing, if you looked at the houses bordering the square, all their doors were closed. The picture displayed only one open door, the one to Otto Mischenbaum’s barn.
Through this, we can explain why the Anderer was murdered by the villagers. The villagers harbored a guilt they tried to deny themselves. They had a shameful past that was impossible to forget. They bore the guilt of betraying their neighbors and handing them over to the Nazis, a crime tantamount to participating in murder, and the sin of standing by while their neighbors perished. The Anderer, or rather his portraits and landscapes, silently exposed these transgressions. The Anderer was not reproaching the villagers for their sins. He was not condemning them.In Göbbler’s portrait, for example, there was a mischievousness of execution which caused the viewer, if he looked at the image from the left, to see the face of a smiling man with faraway eyes and serene features, whereas if he looked at it from the right side, the same lines fixed the expressions of the mouth, eyes, and forehead in a venomous scowl, a sort of horrible grimace, haughty and cruel. Orschwir’s portrait spoke of cowardice, of dishonorable conduct, of spinelessness and moral stain. Dorcha’s evoked violence, bloody actions, unpardonable deeds. Vurtenhau’s displayed meanness, stupidity, envy, rage. Peiper’s suggested renunciation, shame, weakness. It was the same for all the faces.
The villagers could not bear the exposure of their sins and were unable to accept their own actions. More precisely, they could not directly confront their true faces. This is why the villagers killed the Anderer. The Anderer did not possess any special ability. He did not investigate the villagers’ past or deliberately probe the village’s secrets. In fact, he likely knew nothing about the villagers’ past. He merely listened quietly to Brodeck’s confession. He did not even directly paint that story. He simply painted the faces of the villagers and the landscapes of various parts of the village. The villagers themselves, through the Anderer’s eyes, witnessed their past sins in their own faces and discovered their bloodstains remaining in places where tragic and criminal events had occurred. In other words, they recognized that the events they had pushed into the swamp of oblivion were condensed in the form of memories in the Anderer’s paintings. They realized that those past events had never truly ended.the Anderer’s portraits acted like magic revelators that brought their subjects’ hidden truths to light. His show was a gallery of the flayed.
3. Conclusions: Once Again, on the Relationship Between Event and Memory
On the one hand, viewed through the lens of time before the event occurs, the occurrence of the event can be interpreted as the advent of a new situation that is contingent and follows no law. On the other hand, viewed through the lens of time after the event has occurred, the structure can be interpreted as already containing within itself, as a void, the necessity for the event to emerge. Badiou paradoxically asserts that an event is a relatively rare and transformative interruption of the pre-evental present state, while simultaneously arguing that there is necessarily something excessive in the dominant social structure, a void (le vide) that can appear at any time within the historical situation as the origin of all being, representing the inconsistent multiplicity of the order of being itself. He claims that an event is precisely the ‘contingent eruption’ of this void within the historical situation (Badiou 2006; Hallward 2003).To come back to the event, to the random, it’s necessary to insist on the existence of a break. There is a before and an after. This break doesn’t cause a transition from an inferior world to a superior world. We’re still in the same world.
Yes, an event becomes such as it is interpreted. Only as it is appropriated in and through the cultural scheme does it acquire historical significance (Sahlins 1985, p. xiv). Such subjectivity embedded in events suggests that events are more deeply related to “truthfulness” rather than “factual truth”. This aspect becomes even more prominent in cases of tragic events like the Holocaust. As Žižek argues elsewhere, “the very factual deficiencies of the traumatized subject’s report on her experience bear witness to the truthfulness of her report” (Žižek 2008, p. 4). If a Holocaust survivor such as Brodeck is unable to provide a clear narrative of his camp experience, it is precisely this lack of clarity that qualifies him as a more truthful witness.The engaged observer perceives positive historical occurrences as parts of the Event of the French Revolution only to the extent that he observes them from the unique engaged standpoint of Revolution—as Badiou puts it, an Event is self-referential in that it includes its own designation: the symbolic designation ‘French Revolution’ is part of the designated content itself, since, if we subtract this designation, the described content turns into a multitude of positive occurrences available to knowledge. In this precise sense, an Event involves subjectivity: the engaged ‘subjective perspective’ on the Event is part of the Event itself.
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
1 | For books planned with similar objectives to this Handbook, see Radstone and Schwarz (2010); Erll and Nunning (2010); Olick et al. (2011); Kattago (2015); Barash (2016); Casper and Wertheimer (2016); Bond et al. (2016); Kaplan (2023). Despite several similar efforts in recent years to establish the contours of memory studies, which are widely recognized as having an interdisciplinary and international scope, it remains challenging to define the most fundamental issue: ‘memory’ itself, which is the subject of memory studies. |
2 | For the main points of contention surrounding this Handbook, critiques, and the editors’ responses, see Blustein et al. (2017, pp. 495–511). |
3 | Critical Event Studies (CES) is a newly emerged trend within the existing field of Event Management Studies, which has traditionally treated ‘events’ as industrialized occurrences, meaning well-prepared and planned large-scale activities. CES represents an attempt to initiate interdisciplinary research on events by rigorously redefining the concept of ‘event’ from the perspective of ‘event theory’ in contemporary humanities and social sciences. The Routledge Critical Event Studies Research Series continues to publish works aimed at developing CES. For representative examples, see the following books: Spracklen and Lamond (2016); Lamond and Platt (2016); Lamond and Moss (2020); Kubiliute and Lamond (2024). |
4 | Although this paper focuses on exploring the theological significance of the Anderer event by concentrating on the Anderer, it is necessary to consider that Brodeck, the protagonist and narrator of the novel, is also an outsider to the village like the Anderer, and profoundly empathizes with the Anderer’s death in light of his own experience of being previously banished from the village. This ultimately suggests that Brodeck, like the Anderer, is also a figure symbolizing Jesus Christ. Thus, we can interpret as metaphors for Jesus’s death and resurrection the villagers’ handing over of Brodeck to the Nazis for ‘purification,’ Brodeck’s experience of essentially spiritual and social death as a human being in the concentration camp, and the villagers’ shocking reaction “when Brodeck, whom they believed dead, returned alive”. Crucially, there is also a similarity in that both Jesus Christ and Brodeck could no longer remain in their communities after their resurrection. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who brought this point to my attention. |
5 | In a similar vein, Žižek defines an event as “something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things” and “something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation” (Žižek 2014, p. 2). |
6 | According to Benjamin, “history is not only a science but also and not least a form of remembrance (Eingedenken)”. Therefore, “what science has ‘determined’, remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology” (Benjamin 1999, p. 471). |
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Jeong, Y. Memory as Part of an Event, and Events as Signification of Memories: Focusing on Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report. Religions 2025, 16, 185. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020185
Jeong Y. Memory as Part of an Event, and Events as Signification of Memories: Focusing on Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report. Religions. 2025; 16(2):185. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020185
Chicago/Turabian StyleJeong, Yongtaek. 2025. "Memory as Part of an Event, and Events as Signification of Memories: Focusing on Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report" Religions 16, no. 2: 185. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020185
APA StyleJeong, Y. (2025). Memory as Part of an Event, and Events as Signification of Memories: Focusing on Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report. Religions, 16(2), 185. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020185