Memory as Part of an Event, and Events as Signification of Memories: Focusing on Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report

Abstract

This paper attempts to reconceptualize memory as an event from a theological perspective, drawing on the recent dialog between memory studies and Critical Event Studies. To this end, it analyzes the narrative and themes of the 2007 novel Brodeck’s Report by Philippe Claudel, classified as a third-generation Holocaust (narrative) writer in France, within the framework of event studies. The novel has been praised for successfully depicting the tragedy as a universal event transcending spatial–temporal specificity by utilizing the genre of allegory while minimizing references to the historical and geographical specificity of the Holocaust. Extending this evaluation, this paper particularly focuses from a theological perspective on how the protagonist and narrator, Brodeck, simply names the subject of his report—a past event that happened to an unidentified other (Autre) called the ‘Anderer’—as ‘Ereignis’ (event). This is noteworthy because Ereignis is not only the most famous concept representing late Heideggerian philosophy but also holds significant importance in post-Heideggerian modern philosophy as the speculative source of the ‘evental turn’, which, along with the ‘material turn’, constitutes one axis of the ‘ontological turn’ in contemporary humanities and social sciences. In this regard, this work, which narrativizes the universality of the Holocaust, provides interesting implications for the possibility of a disjunctive synthesis between memory studies in the humanities and social sciences and theological event studies. Above all, it stimulates a reconsideration of the conventional dichotomy between memory and event—namely, the commonplace premise of “events that occurred in the past” and “present memories of past events”—as revealed in the definition of memory studies as “naming pasts, transforming futures”. Thus, this paper explores the possibility of reconceptualizing the moment of memory as part of the ongoing event itself from past to present, and the event as a process of symbolic construction of meaning through memory.

1. Introduction: From Memory Studies to Event Studies

As evidenced by the recent publication of the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, comprising 40 papers spanning a wide range of academic disciplines, memory studies today is continually expanding and evolving both internationally and interdisciplinarily, uncovering the various ways in which memory permeates life (Tota and Hagen 2016b).1 However, even the editors of this book use expressions such as ‘theoretical isolationism’ or ‘archipelagos of memory’, indicating that creative exchanges or critical debates between different perspectives are not actively occurring in the field of memory studies. Despite memory being studied in various academic fields, from traditional humanities such as history, literature, and philosophy, to sociology, cultural studies, and political science, and now extending to cognitive psychology and neurophysiology, this diversity rather demonstrates that the field is a collection of isolated islands, highly fragmented. Thus, one of the key objectives of this Handbook is presented as “negotiating the isolation and fragmentation among different national and disciplinary perspectives” (Tota and Hagen 2016a, p. 2).

Indeed, “there are many fine essays included in the Handbook” that “traces the central characteristics that have come to shape the field while providing a survey of future trends in Memory Studies” (Tota and Hagen 2016a, p. 2). However, as the objective of this paper is not to review or introduce this book,2 we will directly enter the main theme of this paper by examining Robin Erica Wagner-Pacifici’s essay, which presents the most intriguing challenge to memory studies as a whole from a theological perspective (Wagner-Pacifici 2016, pp. 22–27).

Wagner-Pacifici, a sociologist well-known in the field of memory studies through her collaborative research on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with Barry Schwartz (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991, pp. 376–420; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 2010, pp. 151–66), an American social psychologist who has significantly influenced various research areas including modern psychology through the concept of collective memory, begins her discussion by pointing out the flawed premise generally shared by humanistic and social scientific studies of memory. According to her, while it is undeniable that memory studies have made significant contributions over the past few decades by elucidating various themes and frameworks such as the distinction between memory and history, the distinction between collective memory and collected memory, the dialectic of memory and forgetting, and the distinction between how memory represents the past and how it aligns with present purposes, they are premised on a series of problematic assumptions about the form and lifespan of historical events themselves.

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.

(Wagner-Pacifici 2016, p. 22)

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).

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.

(Wagner-Pacifici 2016, p. 23)

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’.

If the crisis is, at the very least, “an after-the-fact judgment that something is wrong, an interpretation or reframing of first-order knowledge,” thus representing a form of secondary thought (i.e., memory) in the form of asserting crisis through recollection (Sendroiu 2023, p. 5; Roitman 2014, p. 49), and if an event’s identification is possible only from the standpoint of what Badiou calls ‘an interpreting intervention’, as well as if, that is, one speaks from a subjectively engaged position (Žižek 1999, p. 135), then it follows that “crises and events can coincide, constitute, and even modify the other” (Sendroiu 2023, p. 2).

However, it is noteworthy that Wagner-Pacifici not only calls for reimagining the nature of events themselves but also strongly urges memory researchers to reinvent themselves as ‘event researchers’, while proposing a more clearly defined theoretical program, such as the so-called ‘quantum sociology of events’, similar to quantum mechanics in physics. Particularly, by conceptualizing events as both particles and waves―entities that have form but remain eternally fluid―she provides a clue as to how to articulate the relationship between memory and event (Wagner-Pacifici 2015, pp. 49–60; Wagner-Pacifici 2016, pp. 23–26).

Wagner-Pacifici’s attempt to transform memory studies into event studies, or to integrate the former into the latter, was more fully revealed in her subsequent work published as a monograph, What Is an Event? (Wagner-Pacifici 2017). Citing extensively from works by event researchers in fields such as philosophy, history, media, and cultural studies, including William Sewell Jr., Paul Ricoeur, Andrew Abbott, Jeffrey K. Olick, Marshall Sahlins, Hayden White, and Alain Badiou, Wagner-Pacifici reiterates that the critical problem in dealing with events in the field of memory studies is the apparent obsession with delineating events in time and space.

Even though she acknowledges that memory studies in her own field of sociology served as a mechanism for introducing events as an academic subject by successfully including the so-called initial triggering event on the agenda through methods of analyzing spatiotemporally fixed stones, monuments, and words, Wagner-Pacifici sharply criticizes memory studies as one of the sociological projects that somewhat unconsciously reproduce the tendency to analytically paralyze events. Ultimately, from her perspective, memory studies in sociology were merely a mechanism for surreptitiously introducing events into a discipline that focuses on long-term conditions and is reluctant to pay attention to social discontinuities, critical moments, or disruptive instances in social structures.

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 2017, p. 6)

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’.

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.

(Wagner-Pacifici 2017, pp. 10–11)

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.

From the perspective of Wagner-Pacifici’s event theory, the Holocaust can be considered an object of event studies rather than memory studies. Why is this so? Generally, the event we collectively refer to as the Holocaust is widely known to have begun with the rise of the Nazi Party in 1933 and ended with the liberation of concentration camps by the Allied forces in 1945. However, intuitively, we can recognize that the Holocaust began long before the Nazis came to power and continues to reverberate long after the camps were liberated. Despite the linear trajectory and turning points we typically use to understand events, the event itself continues to change and take on new forms as contexts shift, actors intervene, and other events occur.

Therefore, this paper attempts to reconceptualize memory as an event, referencing both the paradoxical situation in memory studies and the recent dialog between memory studies and ‘Critical Event Studies’.3 To this end, it analyzes the narrative and themes of the novel Brodeck’s Report within the framework of event studies. The novel, originally published in French in 2007 by Philippe Claudel, who is classified as a third-generation Holocaust (narrative) writer in France, was translated into English in 2010 (Claudel 2010). This novel has been praised for successfully depicting the tragedy as a universal event transcending spatial–temporal specificity by utilizing the genre of allegory while minimizing references to the historical and geographical specificity of the Holocaust (Astro 2016; Duffy 2018; Baetens and Frey 2021; Duffy 2023).

Extending this evaluation, this paper particularly focuses from a theological perspective on how the protagonist and narrator, Brodeck, simply names the subject of his report—a past event that happened to an unidentified other (Autre) called the ‘Anderer’—as ‘Ereignis’ (event). This is noteworthy because Ereignis is not only the most famous concept representing late Heideggerian philosophy but also holds significant theoretical importance as the speculative source of the ‘evental turn’, which, along with the ‘material turn’, constitutes one axis of the ‘ontological turn’ in contemporary humanities and social sciences (Chambers 2003, pp. 47–71; Bahoh 2019, pp. 56–102). Of course, in this novel, the event (Ereignis) is also a symbol of the Holocaust.

In this regard, this work, which narrativizes the universality of the Holocaust, provides interesting implications for the possibility of a disjunctive synthesis between memory studies and event studies. Above all, it stimulates a reconsideration of the conventional dichotomy between memory and event—namely, the commonplace premise of ‘events that occurred in the past’ and ‘present memories of past events’—as revealed in the definition of memory studies as “naming pasts, transforming futures” (Tota and Hagen 2016b). Thus, this paper explores the possibility of reconceptualizing the moment of memory as part of the ongoing event itself from past to present, and the event as a process of symbolic construction of meaning through memory.

2. The Ontology of Event in Brodeck’s Report

Philippe Claudel was born in Dombasle-sur-Meurthe, located in the Alsace-Lorraine region of northeastern France, west of the Rhine River, known in German as Elsass-Lothringen. This border region’s birthplace is closely related to the spatial setting of his novel Brodeck’s Report. To present the ontology of the event as it appears in this novel, we will first introduce the narrative of the novel in detail.

2.1. The Narrative Structure of Brodeck’s Report

Let us first examine the basic narrative structure. The story is set shortly after the end of World War II. In a small village presumed to be in the border region between France and Germany, a strange outsider of unknown name and origin appears. The villagers, who speak a unique dialect, call him by various names they have invented. Some call him ‘Full Eyes’ (Vollaugä) because his eyes bulged a bit, others ‘the Whisperer’ (De Murmelnër) because he spoke very little, and always in a small voice that sounded like a breath. Some referred to him as ‘Moony’ (Mondlich) because he seemed to be among them but not of them, while most simply called him ‘Came from over There’ (Gekamdörhin).

One day, this man, who had been the only outsider in the village, suddenly disappears. Initially welcomed by the villagers, he was murdered at the inn where he was staying after only three months. Brodeck, one of the villagers, was commissioned by Hans Orschwir, the village mayor and wealthiest resident, to write a report about this incident. Brodeck introduced himself as someone who barely made a living by regularly submitting ecological survey reports about the village and its surroundings to the authorities. According to the mayor, Brodeck was asked to prepare an accurate and detailed report to prove that there was nothing illegal about the incident and that the villagers were innocent because he was the only person who owned a typewriter and knew how to write.

“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?”

(Claudel 2010, chp. 2)

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.

This novel, this report, and this autobiography begin with the words, “I’m Brodeck and I had nothing to do with it”. As Brodeck was not present at the scene during the event (Anderer murder case), he began to gather information related to the event for an accurate understanding of the truth, naturally revealing the central theme of this novel. Why did the villagers kill the Anderer? Brodeck unraveled this mystery in the process of writing the report, and in doing so, he also learned about the village’s secrets that were closely intertwined with himself. The Anderer event was part of that event that occurred in the process of ‘memorializing’ the Brodeck incident. The report that readers are reading is both a report on the death of the Anderer, the subject of the investigation, and an autobiography of Brodeck himself, the report’s author.

2.2. The Anderer and Brodeck: The Overlapping Life Trajectories of Two Strangers

Let us now examine the plot of the novel in more detail. One afternoon in May, as the day was ending, with the terrible aftermath of war still lingering, a man wearing a strange melon-shaped hat, as if rounded with a plane, suddenly entered Brodeck’s village. He appeared like a ghost from another era, leading a reddish-brown horse and a donkey, carrying large trunks, embroidered clothing, and enigmas.

“… 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.”

(Claudel 2010, chp. 7)

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.

Initially, the villagers welcomed the Anderer with great enthusiasm, even organizing a village-wide reception. However, they gradually began to regard him with suspicion. This unease eventually escalated beyond mere annoyance to severe anxiety. The Anderer had very strange habits, was excessively concerned with his appearance, and exhibited particularly peculiar behavior, such as treating animals as if they were real people. The true nature of the uncanny feeling they experienced towards the Anderer, and ultimately the motive that led them to murder him, is revealed in the latter part of the novel.

As Brodeck investigated the secret behind the Anderer’s murder case, he increasingly realized that the stranger’s death was deeply intertwined with his own life. Brodeck began to project his own life onto the Anderer’s death. In his report, Brodeck included his horrific memories from the forced labor camp during World War II (1939–1945). Like the Anderer, Brodeck was also an outsider in the village. He was an orphan, abandoned by his parents. As a child, he was taken in by a wandering woman named Fedorine, who brought him to this village. They settled in the village, thanks to the kind welcome from the villagers. Brodeck was intellectually gifted. Believing the village needed an educated intellectual, the villagers collectively funded Brodeck’s education, sending him to a university in the ‘capital’. The capital where Brodeck studied is simply referred to as ‘S’, presumed to be Stuttgart, the former Central European capital where the Nazi government established its headquarters in the 1920s. During his studies, he fell in love with a woman named Amelia, and after experiencing some kind of incident, he returned to the village with her.

Brodeck explains that he returned to the village right after the ‘Night of Purification’ (Pürische Nacht). This can be seen as a direct analogy to the ‘Kristallnacht’ (Night of Broken Glass), which occurred from the night of November 9 to the early hours of November 10, 1938. During this event, Nazi stormtroopers and German civilians attacked Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues across Germany as part of an anti-Semitic riot. The event obtained its name from the numerous shattered windows during the attacks; the broken glass shards glittered like crystal in the moonlight, leading Nazi politician Joseph Goebbels to refer to it as the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. Today, in Germany, it is officially called the ‘November Pogroms of 1938’ (Novemberpogrome 1938), as it is historically considered the formal starting point of the subsequent Holocaust. Therefore, Claudel’s description of Pürische Nacht (Night of Purification) reveals his desire to remove the Holocaust from its historical singularity without de-Judaizing it, as suggested by his numerous, albeit veiled, references to anti-Semitism (Duffy 2018, p. 510).

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.

(Claudel 2010, chp. 9)

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.

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.”

(Claudel 2010, chp. 9)

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.

Why, then, was Brodeck, who was not Jewish, sent to a concentration camp? Also, why were the villagers shocked when confronted with Brodeck’s return? From this point, it becomes clear that Brodeck’s event has been ‘memorialized’ through the Anderer murder case. Thus, the Anderer event is situated within the flow of the Brodeck event.

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.

(Claudel 2010, chp. 28)

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’.

“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!”

(Claudel 2010, chp. 30)

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.

During the Nazi occupation of the village, while Brodeck was away, another major tragedy befell the village. One day, three girls fleeing the war were discovered in the forest and brought in by the soldiers. Amelia went to rescue them but ended up imprisoned alongside them. As the sense of Germany’s impending defeat intensified, anxiety-ridden soldiers, with the villagers’ cooperation and tacit consent, tortured and raped the girls and Amelia. As a result of the rape, Amelia gave birth to Poupchette, whom Brodeck accepted as his own daughter and loved wholeheartedly. However, Amelia’s mind, shattered by the incident, never fully recovered.

Driven by an inexplicable impulse, Brodeck visited the Anderer at the inn and confessed about his experiences and life. He calmly recounted his childhood, his life with Fedorine, his arrival in the village, his studies in the capital S., meeting Amelia, his experiences during the Night of Purification, his return to the village, and the hell he endured during the war and in the concentration camp. Although the village had a priest, in the novel, called ‘Father Peiper’, his mind had completely collapsed due to his wartime experiences, and he had internally become a radical atheist. Thus, Brodeck ended up making his confession to the Anderer, in lieu of the priest.

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.

(Claudel 2010, chp. 32)

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.

Brodeck realizes that the villagers had planned to meet on the night of the Anderer’s murder case and wonders why he was not invited. It is revealed that after Brodeck’s return from the concentration camp, the villagers feared their complicity in the hell he had to endure and the fact that his experiences in the camp had made him no longer the same as them. Brodeck submitted the official report to the mayor, but just as Brodeck had done with Diodemus’s letter, the mayor read Brodeck’s official report and then burned it.

“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.”

(Claudel 2010, chp. 39)

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.

2.3. Why Did They (Have To) Kill the Anderer?

The plot has been introduced in some detail due to the novel’s relative obscurity. Undoubtedly, the greatest enigma of this novel, the paramount puzzle to be contemplated, is why the Anderer was murdered. The Anderer appeared to have caused no harm to the villagers. He seemed to have been a nuisance to no one. Yet, what was the reason for his murder?

The portraits and landscapes painted by the Anderer became the decisive factor in rapidly escalating the villagers’ murderous intent and translating it into action. These were unveiled at a party he hosted to reciprocate the villagers’ hospitality. They were not particularly well-executed paintings, at least not in a realistic sense. However, Diodemus assesses that while the Anderer’s paintings were not strictly faithful to their subjects, they were very true, surpassing mere physical resemblance. Brodeck expressed the following impression about his own portrait:

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.

(Claudel 2010, chp. 34)

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.

(Claudel 2010, chp. 34)

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.

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.

(Claudel 2010, chp. 34)

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.

the Anderer’s portraits acted like magic revelators that brought their subjects’ hidden truths to light. His show was a gallery of the flayed.

(Claudel 2010, chp. 34)

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 villagers had been denying and repressing their actions: willingly handing over Brodeck, who had lived among them for a long time but was ultimately a foreigner, in response to the Nazis’ demand for ‘cleansing’, and later condoning the atrocities committed by soldiers against Amelia and the girls. This explained their shocked reaction when Brodeck, whom they believed dead, returned alive. While feeling some discomfort and unease about this ‘repression’, they mistakenly believed they had successfully quelled the aftermath of the events by making an effort to welcome Brodeck. They had felt relieved, thinking they had forgotten the past entirely. However, catalyzed by the presence of the Anderer, an unidentified pure other, the repressed memories returned. All the crimes they had committed and justified on the grounds of ‘difference’ ultimately returned as ‘the real’. The nameless, pure other that was the Anderer served as a catalyst for the return of the repressed.

However, from a theological perspective, a crucial point is that the Anderer can be likened to Jesus Christ (Osawa 2015, pp. 217–18). The Anderer arrived in this village from an unknown origin and was killed without sin. Similarly, Christ entered Jerusalem despite having no need to do so and was executed without sin. The fact that the Anderer brought not only a horse but also a donkey suggests a similarity to Christ. According to the Gospels, Christ entered Jerusalem riding a donkey to fulfill the prophecy in the Old Testament Book of Zechariah. Claudel’s novel Brodeck’s Report places the Anderer in the position of Christ.

Based on these similarities, we can discern the truth of Christ’s murder in Brodeck’s Report. Indeed, upon reading the Gospels, we can understand why Jesus Christ had to be killed and what the specific charges were. According to the Gospels, Jesus was arrested and charged by Jewish authorities primarily for blasphemy and his critical words and actions against the Jerusalem Temple (refer to Matthew 26:61, Mark 14:58, Luke 22:69). However, according to the legal procedures of the time, crucifixion was not the prescribed punishment for these charges. The corresponding sentence under Jewish custom was stoning to death. Stephen, who was later charged with similar offenses as Jesus, was also stoned to death (Acts 7:59).

Therefore, the fact that Jesus was not stoned to death according to Jewish religious law but was crucified—a punishment requiring the Roman governor’s approval—indicates that Jesus was executed as a ‘political criminal’ because he was perceived as a dangerous figure even in the eyes of the Romans under the Roman Empire’s ruling system. From the Roman Empire’s perspective, regardless of Jewish doctrine, Jesus’s words and actions were themselves seen as threatening the social order of Roman-ruled Palestine. Although Jesus did not create a political faction or incite violent uprising, his proclamation of God’s kingdom and healing activities inevitably carried highly political significance in the society of his time. With the advent of God’s kingdom, he heard the groans of those trampled by the ruling powers and strove to liberate them from their state of bondage. Jesus proclaimed a powerful message of criticism against all notions, institutions, powers, and religions that oppressed people so that the oppressed could enjoy freedom. It was precisely these actions that brought about his death.

In short, the ‘structural evil’ of Rome’s violent colonial rule and the Jewish religious authorities who colluded with it killed Jesus. Jesus was a victim of this structural evil. Korean Minjung theology, along with American Black theology and Latin American Liberation theology, have argued that countless people continue to suffer and die due to such structural evil even today (Ahn 2019, p. 150). They assert that numerous socially vulnerable people worldwide are dying in agony due to the violent logic of capital accumulation, political oppression, economic inequality and alienation, social exclusion, colonial exploitation, racial discrimination, and sexual exploitation.

The similarities between the Anderer and Jesus Christ become even more apparent from the perspective of liberation-oriented theology. This is because the Anderer, like Jesus Christ, was also a victim of structural evil. As we have seen, according to Brodeck’s Report, the Anderer reflected all aspects of everyone’s lives like a mirror through his portraits and landscapes, which led to his death. Similarly, we can perceive Jesus’s death as a result of his role as a mirror, reflecting the structural contradictions and moral injustices of his contemporary world, not through paintings but through his own authoritative words and actions.

In this sense, it is philosophically significant that the Anderer murder case is consistently referred to as Ereignis in the novel. Of course, the event of Anderer’s murder is consistently expressed in Brodeck’s Report as Ereigniës, the Alsace-Lorraine regional dialect form of the German Ereignis. Interestingly, Ereignis is also one of the critical concepts in late Heidegger’s philosophy. After the publication of Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie, 1936), the dominant concept that emerged in Heidegger’s philosophy was Ereignis, the ‘event’ in which the truth of Being uniquely manifests itself (Heidegger 2012).

Heidegger, bearing in mind that Ereignis lexically means ‘occurrence of an event’, cautions that this term does not simply refer to ‘things that happened’ (Geschehnis; things; happening) or ‘unexpected, unplanned incidents’ (Vorkommnis; incident) (Heidegger 2002, pp. 20–21). This has led to translations such as ‘enowning’ or ‘appropriation’ in English-speaking contexts. However, it is most appropriate to translate this term simply as ‘event’ without creating a new term (Bahoh 2019, p. 10). This is because in post-Heideggerian modern philosophy, ‘event’ already encompasses what Heidegger wanted to avoid—the everyday meaning of an occurrence within time—and what he wanted to emphasize—the sense of a fundamental event at the ontological level.

What are the theological implications of Heidegger’s philosophical concept of Ereignis? Heidegger consistently emphasized the ontological distinction between Being (sein, be) and beings (seiendes, is-ness). He argued that one should not confuse beings (that which exists) with Being itself. However, this does not mean that Being exists separately from beings. The truth of Being only manifests in beings. In essence, Heidegger asserted that the truth of Being is both simultaneously present in beings and concealed in them. Heidegger referred to the revelation of the truth of Being, along with its concealment, as Ereignis.

The concept of Ereignis has five profound theological implications. The first is Divine Revelation. Just as beings in Ereignis reveal the truth of Being, worldly events or individuals like Christ or the Anderer can reveal divine truth. The second concept is the paradox of presence and absence. The simultaneous presence and concealment in Ereignis parallels the theological concept of God as both immanent and transcendent. The third concept is the revelatory nature of the event. The Christian understanding of revelation through historical events aligns with the idea that events reveal truth rather than static propositions. The fourth is perception and mystery. The aspect of concealment in Ereignis resonates with the theological notion of divine mystery, where revelation always leaves something hidden. The last one is the transformative nature. We can compare Ereignis, an event that reveals truth, to moments of spiritual enlightenment or conversion in religious experiences.

In sum, we can interpret the event of the Anderer’s murder as also accompanying a revelation of truth through concealment. To put it another way, Brodeck’s Report portrays the Anderer’s murder as an Ereignis, an event that both reveals a deeper truth about the village and its inhabitants and simultaneously conceals aspects of that truth. Christian theology similarly views the crucifixion of Christ as an event that simultaneously reveals and conceals divine truth.4 This argument confirms the shared recognition among all contemporary liberation-oriented theologies that Jesus Christ continues to be repeatedly present among victims of structural evil like the Anderer. As Brodeck’s Report demonstrates, we can understand modern events that manifest structural evil, such as the Holocaust, as representations of the Christ event.

3. Conclusions: Once Again, on the Relationship Between Event and Memory

Previously, based on Wagner-Pacifici’s discussion urging a paradigm shift from memory studies to event studies, I closely examined the theological implications of the concept of event (Ereignis), prominently featured in the narrative and themes of Brodeck’s report. From the perspective of the theory of events, I exposed the inherent problems in the conventional premise of memory studies, which differentiates between “events that occurred in the past” and “present memories of past events”.

In conclusion, I aim to explore the possibility of redefining the memory moment as a part of the ongoing event from the past to the present, and the event itself as a process of symbolic construction of meaning through memory, within the broader framework of contemporary event theory. Methodologically, this attempt suggests complementing the limitations of Wagner-Pacifici’s theory of events through modern philosophical and sociological event theories.

Wagner-Pacifici elucidates that an event is not a “pure break” but possesses its own continuities, durations, and sequences essential for its existence (Wagner-Pacifici 2017, pp. 45–46). This explanation has the advantage of dissolving the dichotomy between memory and event by avoiding the duality of structure and event and emphasizing the continuity of events. However, as Tellmann points out, Wagner-Pacifici shows the limitation of reducing the theory of events to formal logic by focusing on the analysis of “generic capacities and operational logic of forms” (Tellmann 2018, pp. 94–95).

Thus, she avoids philosophical reflection or conceptual discussion about events and hastily turns to ‘speech act theory’ as a conceptual model for thinking about events as forms without much explanation. Since it is difficult to establish a philosophically profound theological theory of events through her discussion that reduces the theory of events to speech act theory, I now intend to examine the contemporary theory of events in a broader sense beyond Wagner-Pacifici.

During the first few decades of the 21st century, we have witnessed a return to ontology along with metaphysics. In the history of ideas, the ontological turn in contemporary humanities and social sciences is based on Heidegger’s ontological thinking about what it means to ‘be’ in the world. The ‘ontological turn’ currently underway in contemporary humanities and social sciences, particularly led by the field of anthropology which aims ‘beyond the human’, can also be seen as accompanied by an evental turn—or a Speculative Turn—under the trend of post-Heideggerian ontology (Bryant et al. 2011; Žižek 2014; Paić 2020; Simon 2020).

Traditionally, events were often given a secondary or derivative status and used to support substances or subjects. In other words, events were understood as changes in the attributes of substances. However, with the ‘evental turn’ in 20th-century modern philosophy by philosophers such as Whitehead, Bergson, and Heidegger, events have come to signify sudden and transformative occurrences that rupture existing conditions and create new situations. Here, an event must have the essential element of unpredictability, cannot be reduced to any social determinism or causal relationship, and is thus captured as a moment of ‘rupture’ that has effects not included in its conditions. Consequently, in modern philosophy, the event has been elevated to the status of a fundamental ontological category. Therefore, the main problem of ontology is now redefined as explaining the nature of events and their position in reality.

According to this ontology of events, events or certain entities with an evental character populate the world. However, James Bahoh (2019, pp. 1–2) understands that the meaning of an event is not singular and encompasses at least three distinct interpretations. In the first sense, events refer to occurrences or things that happen within the regular functioning of the world, such as a leaf falling to the ground, making a decision, performing an action, or friends’ meetings. In other words, an event is simply a phenomenal happening. Nevertheless, as a phenomenon, it has reasons and forces of its own, apart from any given symbolic scheme. Of course, as long as events have this meaning, they correspond to exactly what Heidegger opposed as the meaning of Ereignis. For him, Ereignis does not mean the common occurrences or events we experience in reality, but rather an ontological event, that is, an event that Being itself brings about within the destiny of Being, or the occurrence of that event.

In the second sense, an event is a rupture or turning point of irregular change that opens up a horizon of new possibilities. This can be considered the basic concept of the event widely used by post-foundational philosophers today (Marchart 2007, pp. 18–22). Such events can occur in various contexts, including social, political, artistic, linguistic, psychological, conceptual, romantic, and literary, and create truly new forms of thinking, acting, and being. For instance, in Badiou’s terms, a prominent philosopher of events, “an event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable”, that is, an event “is the creation of a possibility, it opens up a possibility”, and it “indicates to us that a possibility exists that has been ignored” (Badiou and Tarby 2013, p. 9).5

In contrast, in the work of Rancière, who is considered a prominent philosopher of events along with Badiou, the concept of event emerges in the context of his well-known distinction between the ‘police’ and ‘politics’ (Chambers 2013, pp. 8–9; Bassett 2016, pp. 280–93). Therefore, for Rancière, politics as an event occurs when it challenges the hierarchy of the police in the name of fundamental equality that should be presupposed (or axiomatically assumed) among participants in a democratic social order based on equal sovereignty, thus when “the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part” (Rancière 1999, p. 11). In other words, events such as democratic politics opposing liberal policing revolve around moments of democratic failure, where a miscount makes a lie of claims to universality and inclusion in an existing order. In the absence of foundations, when “no social order is based on nature”, political events transpire when society is reminded that human equality is the sole reality (Rancière 1999, p. 16).

The third meaning of an event can be found in the post-metaphysical tradition of modern continental philosophy, represented by thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze, who argued that no ontology can be sufficient without attributing an evental nature to being itself. Particularly in the Deleuzian sense, an individual as an event is a fluid being that is neither substance nor essence. In other words, insofar as it is an event, an individual is not a continuous process but an interruption, a discontinuity. Ultimately, an event is not a single entity but closer to an assemblage based on a combination of heterogeneous attributes, that is, structure and becoming.

Regarding this third meaning, social scientists have also elevated the event to a core category of ‘social ontology’ by defining it as a ‘structural transformation’ occurring within the structure. For instance, while sharing Heidegger’s insight “that an event is not simply a phenomenal happening” (Sahlins 1985, p. xiv), anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explains that an “event is indeed a happening of significance, and as significance, it is dependent on the structure for its existence and effect”; therefore, “an event is a relation between a certain happening and a given symbolic system” (Sahlins 1985, p. 153). Building on Sahlins’ understanding of events, historical sociologist William Sewell argues “that events should be conceived of as sequences of occurrences that result in transformations of structures” (Sewell 2005, p. 227). For Sewell, regardless of the nature of the original rupture, an occurrence is deemed a historically significant ‘(historical) event’ only when it initiates a sequence of events that permanently alters existing structures and practices.

Let us summarize. Because the first meaning of the event is frequently eliminated in thinking traditions that emphasize the second and third meanings, it is possible to conclude that the term ‘event’ is largely employed in the second and third senses in contemporary humanities and social sciences. Of course, these two theoretical genealogies explaining events equally emphasize that an event is essentially an unpredictable rupture in the current social structure, social order, social formation, or in the present state of everyday life at the individual level. However, they reveal significant differences when explaining the relevance of the pre-evental context to the event, that is, in focusing on the pre-evental context both at the theoretical level and in actual cases. Let us examine the similarities and differences between the two.

First, it is certain that in contemporary humanities and social sciences, an event begins with a kind of rupture that triggers chain effects that are not reabsorbed into the ‘apparently’ existing social structure. Historical events such as the ‘French Revolution’, often cited as examples of events by many event theorists since Hegel, change social relations in a completely unpredictable way in their causal connections and consequent gradual changes. In short, in contemporary humanities and social sciences, an event must have the essential element of unpredictability, cannot be reduced to any social determinism or causal relationship, and is thus captured as a specific moment of rupture that has effects not included in its conditions.

While the second and third concepts of events may seem similar, they can be interpreted differently in terms of the temporality of events. In the former genealogy, there is a strong tendency to understand events as the emergence of incompatible properties within existing social relations, that is, as breaking the logic of current social relations. Thus, even when it signifies social transformation, such a transformative event is considered a thorough rupture rather than a modification or improvement of reality. When post-foundational thinkers like Badiou, Žižek, and Rancière emphasize ‘events’ both theoretically and politically, they consistently tend to consider social transformation as events rather than historical processes, and radical politics more in terms of participation in revolutionary events than processes of social change.

In contrast, in the third genealogy, events are ultimately thought of not as the loss of reality or the emergence of something new that breaks with the past, but from the perspective of something new that originates from the past and transforms the present. On one hand, because the new originates from the past, it must be explained by existing structures, contradictions, tendencies, and obstacles. On the other hand, the new transforms the present because it initiates a process that affects its actual conditions by involving a rupture with the past. As implied by the very concept of event, the reality of newness cannot be found in itself but overflows into the past and future (Renault 2016, p. 30).

Badiou is an interesting theorist who can be taken as a philosophical reference in both of these genealogies. As some recent Badiou scholars have pointed out while intervening in the debate surrounding the relationship between ‘event’ and ‘subject’ in Badiou and Žižek, in Badiou’s philosophical system, due to the parallax effect of the event’s occurrence, there always exists the possibility of reading the event in both pre-evental time and post-evental time (Johnston 2007, pp. 12–13; Agra 2018, pp. 21–22).

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.

(Badiou and Tarby 2013, p. 126)

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).

These two interpretative approaches to events provide useful insights for reconstructing the relationship between memory and events. Firstly, viewing the moment of memory as part of an ongoing event from the past to the present implies, conversely, that something from the past remembered from the present perspective can acquire historical significance as an event only insofar as it is actively remembered, critiqued, and interpreted within and through the schemas of society and culture. By viewing memory as part of the event, paradoxically, the conclusion is drawn that the ‘eventalization’ of something that has occurred is only possible when accompanied by subjective ‘memorialization’. When Žižek critiques François Furet’s revisionist interpretation of the French Revolution as a ‘de-eventalization’ of the French Revolution, the importance of memory in the process of eventalization is captured.

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.

(Žižek 1999, pp. 136–37)

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.

Thus, we can now conceptualize an event as memory, or more precisely, as ‘remembrance’ (Eingedenken) in the Benjaminian sense, which encompasses both recollection and mournful memory (Benjamin 2003, p. 395). For Benjamin, remembrance means the process of symbolic construction of meaning through the practice of memory that views the past not as a simple object of recollection but as something to be redeemed, actualizing it in relation to the present.6

When understood in this way, it becomes even clearer that an event is a relationship itself that binds together the contingent incident that has already occurred and the contexts prior to that incident, such as social structures or cultural norms. This interpretation indicates that an event “is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change in the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it” (Žižek 2014, p. 10). Therefore, memory is a moment where the event is temporarily condensed through various material forms as part of a continuous event, but it is only through such memory that the event can be signified as an event.