Between depiction and experience: the exile dreams of Paula Ludwig.

Well before her exile to Brazil in 1940, the Austrian-born poet Paula Ludwig began to associate dreaming with the loss of Heimat (homeland)--a notion that she adopted as a literary motif in her lyrical prose volume Traumlandschaft (1935). In Traume (Dreams, 1962), Ludwig displayed her continued interest in the dream motif--this time as a means to confront the exile experience. In a close reading of selected Traume texts, this essay demonstrates the ways in which Ludwig's complex, dynamic notion of the dream--conceived as a means to record and to create worlds--allows her to thematize the dialectical relationship between experience and depiction in exile. To further enhance the readings of Ludwig's texts, I draw on examples from exile theory and memoirs, revealing the ways that the relationship among dreaming, writing, and exile is figured in these discourses. (MDR)

"For when I was nine years old, we left that land for good, and from then on I felt as though it had been transported from the earth. My homeland [Heimat] became the source of my dreams, my homesickness the root of all the subsequent blossoms..." (10). (1) This excerpt, taken from Paula Ludwig's Traumlandschaft (Dream Landscape, 1935), decisively affirms the importance of the dream motif and its association with Heimat for her early literary work. Yet, only five years after penning these words, Ludwig experienced the most radical break with any form of Heimat she had known to date, marked namely by her escape from Nazi Europe to Brazil, where she remained for thirteen years. Even after her exile in 1940, Paula Ludwig continued to employ the dream motif in her writings, most notably in her 1962 selection of lyrical prose entitled Triiume (Dreams), which includes pieces written during the Brazil years. The dream texts from Ludwig's Brazil years assert a particular relationship between dreaming, exile experience, and literature--a relationship that also leaves its traces in exile discourse. A close reading of selected Traume texts will demonstrate the ways that Ludwig appropriates the dream motif as a means to confront exile themes, including identity-formation and loss of Heimat. Endowed with the potential to enlighten, to unravel, and to effect change, Ludwig's dreams also unfold the dialectical relationship between experience and depiction in exile. Traume has long been deserving of scholarly attention, not only for its evocative, pregnant prose, but also for its role in illuminating alternatives for the literary manifestation of exile.

Elisabeth Bronfen's 1994 essay "Entortung und Identitat: Ein Thema der Modernen Exilliteratur" (Displacement and Identity: A Theme of Modern Exile Literature) provides a basis for thinking about the link between dreaming and exile by exploring the particular ways in which themes such as political turmoil and the resulting psychic trauma emerge in exile literature. In particular, she cites a psychological study of the dreams of individuals living under the Third Reich. These dreams, recorded from 1933 to 1939, are read "as the symptom of a working through of conflicts that are raised by a political reality" (70). The author of this study, Charlotte Beradt, a journalist who herself was forced into exile in 1939, concluded that these dreams reflect a progressive convergence of public and private space in the lives of her subjects. This phenomenon she attributed to the rise of the Third Reich. While Bronfen presents this study as a point of departure for her own literary-historical concerns, it is worth reflecting on the fact that such recording of dreams for the sake of demonstrating the progressively changing structure of one's living space and the effect of that change upon the individual under Nazism went on during the very years when Ludwig took up the dream motif in her writing.

Drawing on Beradt's study for her own reading of the literary "working through" of the exile experience, Bronfen reads the convergence of public and private in parallel with a merging of experience (Erfahrung) and depiction (Darstellung) for the exiled writer (72). To the realm of depiction belong both dreaming and writing, whereas experience encompasses political reality, the laws generated by that reality, and the trauma to which these events and laws give rise (70). Significantly, in Bronfen's model, the pairing of dreaming and writing is not a function of exile-specific conditions, but of their shared nature as "psychic-imaginary" activities (70). The main event arising from exile-specific conditions is, rather, the merging of depiction and experience--of dreaming and writing with political events.

Understood for its biographical and historical implications, the encroachment of public/experience on private/depiction might mean that political events somehow hinder or adulterate the individual's ability to engage in independent thinking, writing, or dreaming. This would suggest that the exiled individual's psychic-imaginary activities cease, or that they are prohibitively mediated by external events. Viewed in another light, however, the encroachment could provide new content for psychic-imaginary activities, such that the writer's craft takes on a new purpose--namely of engaging with historical circumstances.

When we deal with the more generic categories of experience and depiction on the textual level, the repercussions of their entanglement are quite dramatic. For one, the experiential aspect of depicting--the act of writing or dreaming--acquires a heightened importance, such that depicting becomes constitutive for the exiled writer's experience. Through living and chronicling--be it in one's dreams or manuscripts--the exiled individual is simultaneously insider and outsider, participant and observer. Also, by inclining toward the experiential, depiction assumes an unpredictable, volatile quality, as though subject to the arcane causality of life itself. Yet, by entering the arena of life, it at the same time possesses the force to effect change. From the opposite standpoint, considering the depictive aspect of experience means focusing on the method of rendering events, rather than on events' contents. Deconstructing events to unravel how experience depicts itself is both an aesthetic and a moral pursuit for the exiled author, and is particularly suited to dealing with the subject of the Third Reich. In essence, it is an explanatory task that turns attention to the mechanisms of history and politics and their effects on consciousness and memory.

Fritz Beer, exiled writer and critic, also offers reflections on the relationship among dreaming, writing, and exile by way of personal experience. In a 1996 lecture, he tells of the struggle with language and self-definition that he faced as a Czech-born Jew of German-speaking parents who spent most of his adult life in England. After discussing the difficulties and advantages of being a multilingual yet homeless writer, Beer confesses, "I have lived in England for 57 years. I do not know whether I dream in German or in English." This seemingly incongruous observation, made in the context of a discussion of the writing process, is immediately followed by the statement, "In the ever-fearful first moment before the blank, white sheet of paper, often an English word occurs to me at first. I translate it into German, in order to sputter around with it some more..." (8). Beneath this seamless transition between the topics of dreaming and of writing for Beer lies an unelaborated assumption about the relationship between the two acts. Why should his reflections on the exiled writer's craft be interrupted suddenly by a memory, what is more a memory of something always forgotten--or at least never definitively grasped?