Aleksandar Tišma's Kapo (1987) begins with a strange realization of error that creates a ripple effect of misunderstanding through the rest of the novel. In Bosnia, a mislaid newspaper in an incomprehensible yet familiar language will change the course of the newly freed Vilko Lamian's life. Shuddering at the word Szabadka, Vilko is jolted back to a moment-and a woman-he would rather forget. This word (and the woman), improbably yet comfortably far away, now inaugurate a renewed awareness of proximity, complicity, and implicated subjecthood.
My presentation will focus on key moments of incomplete, missed, and failed understanding and connection that compound throughout the novel. These moments are often extreme and undergirded by paranoid notions of fatedness. The memories of Lamian-revealed to be the titular Kapo, a Yugoslav Jew who escapes Auschwitz to be haunted by his forced participation in the murder and humiliation of fellow detainees-are partial, and narratively insert moments of improbable/unlikely mistakes and errors while also drawing upon and centering the real histories of collaboration between Germany and the Nazi Puppet State of independent Croatia. Lamian's memory is marked by mis-directionality through inventive mistakes and narrative missed connections, reflects historical realities of diverse attachments and strange cross-national affiliations of Central and Southern Europe.
This project also considers more broadly the comparative work in memory studies that has stressed notions of multidirectionality, intersectionality, knottedness, complex implicatedness, and dangerous intersections while centering the implicated subject as a figure for reading historical participation in complex histories beyond the victim-perpetrator binary. Can patterns of partiality, mis-directionality, and failure productively center histories that are already marked by marginalization or misremembering? How can interrupted or failed convergences work in service of memory and reconciliation? As I answer these questions, I hope to add to the MSA's broader conversations on convergences while being attuned to Southern European participation in the concentrationary and genocidal environment of WWII Europe.
