Publication details
Train journey to depths of „grave of forgetting“ : trauma and affective epistemic knowledge in Alois Nebel trilogy
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | According to Aleida Assmann, the “historical memory of a nation” emerges from the “grave of forgetting.” In the Czech comic trilogy Alois Nebel (2003–2005; Jaroslav Rudiš, Jaromír 99), scenes that have been repressed by the socialist regime return in the form of spectres, which the stationmaster Alois Nebel perceives in a railway station in the Czech borderlands. The train helps here to frame national trauma as international. Through its movement, it functions as a mediator connecting the catastrophes of twentieth-century Europe, particularly the Holocaust and the violent expulsion of Germans. This shift from the individual to the collective – as Paul Ricour notes, our memory is always intertwined with the memory of others – is visible through the perspective of Nebel, who sees images such as the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. The past metaphorically arrives here as a delayed train, in the form of latency, and this temporal incoherence is also inscribed in the work’s elliptical narration. The analysis of these expressive means and their relationship to the figuration of international trauma is the primary aim of my paper. Drawing on literary theory, trauma studies, and the philosophy of memory, I will focus on affectivity which allows me to grasp the poetics of Alois Nebel in its fragmentation, because, in Assmann’s words, affect “preserves the fragments of memory that enter storage memory as parts lacking a whole.” Visual strategies of the trilogy will also be discussed, since Alois Nebel works with explicit depiction of ethnic violence and physical pain, which creates a rupture in the narration, and allows, as Cathy Caruth’s writes, history “to arise where immediate understanding may not.” The trilogy will thus be examined as a work that constructs an image of affective epistemic knowledge of the borderland’s past, in which the railway station stands upon the "bones of the dead" and fragments of collective trauma materialize. Emerging from the "grave of forgetting", these fragments are articulated through affect and visuality, with Nebel functioning as a personification through which the region itself comes to find its voice. |
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