Postscript: of traveling companions and fractured worlds

In the course of writing about Asia in this "Obdurate History" text, I was moved to reflect more and more on European history, my own childhood memories of England in the context of World War II (I was horn in 1933), and my particular Jewish connections at that early age. Although not Jewish myself, my mother and I had shared a house for some ten years, beginning around 1941, with Hans Redlich, a German Jewish musicologist, and Lisa, his wife, and it was also at that time that I first met my now-unofficially-adopted mother, Rose Hacker, a London-born eastern European Jew.

Thus, staying in Berlin that summer of 2001 was very timely for these reflections about European history and memory, as was a more recent visit in January 2003 to Berlin (again), Vienna (where I had lived for six months when I was nineteen years old), and Prague. It was in Prague that I began a third text about Rachel Marker. In this still-unfinished play, Rachel Marker, the Angel of Death, and the Golem, Marker announces in one of her letters to Franz Katka (which she writes daily from a cafe): "Today the play begins. I myself will shortly leave the city for Berlin, but the Golem and the Angel of Death will stay for a while. I am not sure what part I will assume in the play, or how it will end, or ..."

In ways I don't fully understand at the moment, Marker has become one of my main guides through the fractured worlds of European history, especially the 1914-45 period in central and eastern European and Jewish history to which I am increasingly drawn. I am haunted by this period of totalitarianisms, wars, and revolutions, coupled with radical experiments in the arts and literature surely because of its really grim parallels with the present.

Berkeley, May 2003

(1.) Sponsored by the College Art Association. these Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds essays can be found as follows: Parts 1-2, "Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds," Art Journal 58, no. 2 (summer 1999): 82-93; Part 3, "Spaces and Histories, England, March 1999." avail, online at http://www.collegeart.org/caa/ publications/AJ/artjournal.html; Part 4. "Oan Hon (Lost Souls), Lament for Cambodia. Vietnam. Hiroshima, Kosovo, and East Timor," Performance Research 6, no. I (spring 2001): 108-16, and the Artjournal website mentioned above; Part 5, "Of Self and History: Exchanges with Linda Nochlin." Art Journal 59, no. 3 (fall 2000): 18-33, reprinted in Of Self and History, In Honor of Linda Nochlin, ed. Aruna d'Souza (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001); Part 6. "Flo Oy Wong. 'made in usa.' a story in three parts," in Flo Oy Wong, made in usa: Angel Island Shhh, ed. Brian Komei Dempster (San Francisco: Kearny Street Workshop, 2000), 14-44; Part 7, "Faith Ringgold: Putting Jones Road on the Map," Nka, Journal of Contemporary African Art 13/14 (spring/summer 2001): 18-25; Part B, "The Pierian Spring, August 20-29, 2000" and "R. and The Great Library of Alexandria," the Art Journal website mentioned above; "The Pierian Spring" was also punished in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 24, vol. 12, no. 2 (fall 2002): 175-82; Part 9, "Obdurate History: Dinh Q. Le, the Vietnam War, Photography, and Memory." Art Journal 60. no 2 (summer 2001): 38-53.