Authors
Linda Paganelli1; Snežana Stanković2; 1 Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany; 2 Friedrich Schiller University, Germany Discussion
While following the places that once featured as scenes of detention, torture, and mass death in Serbia and Croatia, this paper concerns entanglements between World War II and the recent past when Yugoslavia fell apart. It picks up the ongoing events related to the war of the 1990s and the present day, where Holocaust remembrance becomes a playground for political negotiations within the binary model of victims and perpetrators. We aim to explore how the fates of those persons once detained and doomed to die fade away, even if they often reach us through news, images, and circulating debates around the genocidal past(s).
The paper revolves around a short documentary by Linda Paganelli, “Imprinted,” that attempts to echo the physical and atmospheric traces of people who have violently perished in World War II. In the form of the horror poem, the film searches for layers hidden behind the seemingly nameless landscapes, memorials, emotional attitudes and stories of the living. The audience gets a partial and sensorial view of the enduring past by being taken on an aural journey through non-human dimensions of nature. Such a fragmentary and poetic standpoint hopes to destabilize the privileged historical position of humans.
