Trauma: Memory

In the German tongue, Kristallnacht is now known as the November Pogroms. In English, it remains ‘The Night of Broken Glass’; even when it is referred to by its updated nomenclature, its original name has to be cited otherwise nobody knows what you are talking about.

A night of broken glass references more than a terrible vision of ransacked Jewish businesses. It tells of the beginning of the end, irrevocable consequences: Jewish existence in Europe had always been fragile, but now it was destined for annihilation. Even if the name was supposed to be ironic—the romantic vision of a ‘crystal night,’ jewelled streets glinting with hope and riches for the Third Reich—this concept never caught on in the English language. It’s fair to say that The Night of Broken Glass has undertones of the kind of grotesque glamorised monikers assigned to serial killers, but at least it speaks of horror and lodges itself in the mind. Each terrible fragment of glass contains the palpable, stinking fear, humiliation, murders, rapes, destruction of livelihoods, and robbing of homes. The shards contain the aftermath of atrocities, the arrests, the debasing, the ghettos, the camps. They also contain our present cultural memory: World War II, the Holocaust, Atom Bombs.

Traumatic memories often take the form of a smashed-looking glass. An event shattered and refracted, spanning greater space and time than the original trauma; moments that rear their heads with crystalline clarity so sharp you can taste them. Large fragments are to be handled between two carefully pinched fingers; these contain terrible visions and stories but ones that can be articulated and make up the broad brushstrokes of the events. Then there are the smaller, impossible blades destined to cut you no matter how careful you are, jagged shards that perfectly encapsulate a terrible wound, a sensory evocation that screams danger. These are the ones that define PTSD, summoned by benign triggers like a ceiling fan that recalls the motion and sound of a chopper. Or, the sound of distant sirens, the smell of burning toast, a close-up of flames on a movie screen, even once a glass of wine whose ‘complex’ notes smelled of a burnt-out building left to rot in Melbourne’s autumn sun. A part of you is returned completely, the old and new wounds collapse into one another; blood drips. Then there are the splinters, invisible until light hits them and prone to burying themselves in the fleshy pad of your heel, forgotten, submerged into numbness until they wiggle their way to the surface months or years later. An unexpected, brief re-emergence of this terrible time, uncomfortable but tolerable. It’s hard to know if it’s better for them to stay buried within or rise to the surface.

Traumatic memories are not allowed to recede into softened variations like other memories. They endure, perhaps necessarily so, as warnings, reminders, lessons. They exist in both the psyche of the individual and as cultural consciousness, too, as history.