Passe douloureux et présent apaisé ? Des récits de vie de femmes allemandes et polonaises en Silésie dans le documentaire Aber das Leben geht weiter [Mais la vie

Abstract

Two elderly German women return with their daughter and niece to their former family home in Silesia (Poland), only to find the current Polish home owner along with her descendants. This is how the German film director Karin Kasper documents her own family history together with that of the Polish family installed in their farmhouse after the Second World War, in her movie Aber das Leben geht weiter [But Life Goes On], produced in 2010. I aim to analyze the representation of this exclusively feminine intergenerational and international encounter. Fueled mainly by the narratives of elderly people, but also by photographs and videos taken from the respective family archives, and, of course, by several recordings of the participants themselves as well as the house and the village where these reunions take place, this documentary’s objective is to preserve and share the memories of the older generation. Such memories stir up very painful facets of the history of the 20th century in Eastern Europe: Second World War, persecutions and forced displacements of Polish ethnics by Germans and Soviets, flight and expulsion of the Germans, etc. Which light do these exclusively feminine micro-histories shed on the historical facts? How are the traumatic experiences expressed even decades afterwards? Could it really be a question of resilience? What emotions arise from what is said, but also from silences and postures? What heritage of memory and post-memory has been transmitted to the next generations? More broadly, can this “film testimony” contribute to the German-Polish reconciliation? Such are the main questions to which I wish to respond.