Breaking the Blockade
Hunger, Trauma, and Memory in Lidiia Ginzburg
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Soviet memorial literature addresses the Wehrmacht’s blockade of Leningrad in a variety of ways. But for ideological reasons, it paid little attention to a key aspect of the physical and psychological reality: hunger. Only literary scholar and writer Lidiia Ginzburg investigated hunger as a physical, cultural, and existential fact in her writings about the blockade. She asked how the memory of this extreme situation could be kept alive. Going beyond official memory culture, she expanded the field of aesthetic and intellectual discussion of the Leningrad population’s experience with suffering.
(Osteuropa 8-9/2011, pp. 281–296)