Re-enactments have become an increasingly popular mode of predominantly war-related history. In contrast to conventional modes of historical inquiry, re-enactment offers a 'body-based discourse' through which the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experiences. So far, most studies on re-enactment have focussed on the agency of reenactors in the appropriation of historical representations (Agnew, 2004, 2007; Braedder et al. 2017; Daugbjerg, 2014; Gapps, 2009). This article will specifically explore how the embodied aspect of re-enactment may construct certain emotional responses to war history.
This study is based on a sensory ethnography of two female re-enactment groups portraying the Flakhelferinnen and Army Nurse Corps in World War II and aims to analyse how reenactors seek intimate and immediate encounters with 'war' through predominantly multisensory and emotional experiences. The analysis demonstrates how re-enactment practices address issues of endurance, resilience, and suffering. The willingness to go through such hardships is regarded as indicative of the reenactors' experiences of authenticity and generates an 'affective authority' over war history, the claim of knowing the past on the basis of an emotional and embodied experience of it (West, 2014). A successful collective endurance of such suffering results in strong affective bonds that protagonists identified as 'sisterhood'. From a ritual point of view, re-enactment then serves as a rite-of-passage in which physical experiences serve to access certain sentimental and emotional states, namely a sense of belonging. Re-enactment can therefore be understood as part of the affective turn that emphasizes the emotions and affect in social and cultural processes of remembering (Ahmed, 2014), while simultaneously enacting criticism on conventional war history.
Keywords: re-enactment, embodiment, sensory ethnography, historical representation, cultural politics of emotion
