Bracelet, Hand Towel, Pocket Watch: Objects of the Last Moment in Memory and Narration

Abstract

One indicator of increased public awareness of the theme "Kindertransport" is the fact that this event gradually is making its way into literature. Aside from the few fictional accounts (Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm, 1987, and W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001) there are numerous autobiographical texts about the "Kindertransport." These describe—in the form of keepsakes and clothing—an important landscape of remembrance and relating that contains entire thematic complexes symbolically solidified within it. Objects make a child's experience concrete; they become links to parents and later they support remembrance; with greater distance, such items serve the function of bracketing an experience. As special "transitional objects" (Winnicott) they still have not found their place within the psychology of personal objects.

Introduction: The Surviving Thing: Personal Objects in the Aftermath of Violence

“…Objects ‘touched by beloved hands’ can also provide a tangible connection with the killed. The physical handling of those possessions partially offsets the absence of murdered relatives and supports the articulation of conflict-related trauma (Körte, 2004). In a similar vein, studies focusing on mementoes preserved by war veterans and their families (be it an old letter, a commemorative scrapbook, or the bloodstained shirt of a fallen partisan) demonstrate how such artefacts can activate ‘embodied storytelling’: those things simultaneously trigger memories, provide the teller with coping mechanisms and constitute a haptic anchoring in the present (De Nardi, 2014).…”

Traversing Mass Tragedies: Material Religion Between the 9/11 and Newtown Memorials

“…tragedy, the role that her angel statue has played in her life resonates in meaningful ways with these studies and others. 40 In all of these cases, an embodied practice or material object serves as a physical means of stabilizing and working upon a situation that feels ungrounded or impossible to tackle abstractly. The angel statue allowed Sylvia to take action and establish a sense of agency when other modes of grieving were inaccessible.…”

Smashing ourselves to smithereens: Object collection, death, and creative writing as salvation

“…Another item on the shelf; each an embedded tale within the frame narrative of our collected and collective lives.In 'Bracelet, Hand Towel, Pocket Watch: Objects of the Last Moment in Memory and Narration', Mona Korte explores the significance of material possessions (referring to Donald Winnicott's 'transitional objects' theory, as does Gibson) in relation to the narrative of remembrance of the 'Kindertransport', the conveyance of nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Berlin and Nazi occupied Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia to England by rail between 1938 and 1939 prior to the outbreak of war. In the article,Korte (2004) narrates the following story:In February 2001, the Jewish Museum in Berlin received a packet containing a small towel, folded delicately and neatly, ironed and embroidered with the monogram: 'MK,' for Margarete Kuttner. It was sent by Paul Kuttner from New York; the hand towel was his last gift from his mother when, as a 16-year-old, he left Berlin on February 8, 1939 on a Kindertransport bound for England.…”