BGHS.NEWS

Mirror Images

Life stories are not only personal. Just as history is not impersonal. The two are sometimes in strong tension with each other. This was impressively demonstrated by the Interdisciplinary Dialogue on the topic of "Memories between Life Stories and History", which the BGHS organised on 15 April.

Danielle Schwartz, a filmmaker from Israel, showed her multi-award-winning short film "Mirror Image", in which she explores different perspectives on events in Israeli history in conversation with her grandparents. A decorative wall mirror, which has a place of honour in the grandparents' house, serves to address previously unspoken issues, namely the expulsion of the original population in the course of the founding of the state of Israel. How did the mirror end up in the grandfather's family? Together with her grandparents, Danielle tries to write down the history of the mirror, doing justice to both her grandparents' memories and the historical narrative. Even identifying the former owners turns out to be difficult. Was it a Palestinian family, as Danielle assumes, or an Arab family, as her grandmother describes it? And how did the mirror change hands? By buying, taking, plundering? Her grandfather doesn't know. But the struggle for the term that brings the two stories together is also a struggle full of conflict for a shared family history.

The filmmaker's dialogue with sociologist Ruth Ayaß, historian Klaus Weinhauer and, last but not least, an interested and intelligent audience revealed the many dimensions of the film, whose images can show what language cannot. At the end of the film, the grandparents and Danielle agree with the outcome of their negotiation process. But it is obviously not satisfactory. The gap between the different perspectives seems too deep. It was all the more touching to see how the deep affection between the three of them bridges the gap without succumbing to the temptation to fill it in.

This somewhat different Interdisciplinary Dialogue made an unexpected kind of discussion possible. Together, the filmmaker, the researchers on the podium and the audience worked out the lines of tension between the grandparents' memories and the resulting narrative of their lives on the one hand, and the granddaughter's narrative, which attempts to think through the underlying historical conflict on the other. The dialogue thus not only transcended disciplinary boundaries, but also brought art and science into a fruitful exchange.