Genealogy Composition in Response to Trauma: Gender and Memory in 1 Chronicles 1–9 and the Documentary Film "My Life Part 2”

Abstract

The thesis asks which characteristics of the biblical genealogies turn them into a form of cultural memory that has the potential to make sense of traumatic and fractured pasts, and to integrate them into present conceptions of identity and agency. Specifically, it asks which role gender plays in such a process. Methodically, I conceptualize gendered genealogies as a form of cultural memory, with a focus on notions of performance, gender, and archival theory. On the basis of this analytical frame, I read the gendered genealogy composition in 1 Chronicles 1–9 together with the post-Shoah documentary film “My Life Part 2” (Angelika Levi, Berlin, 2003). Both text and film suggest that fissures, gaps, and irregularities in the genealogy performance, more often gendered than not, are keys to understanding how genealogies function in response to traumatic pasts. In a concluding theology of genealogies, I argue that the narrow formal structure of the genealogies presses towards breaking open this very structure and to subvert it. However, the process of breaking open takes place without a collapse of the genealogical form. Instead, a space emerges that allows addressing fractures, paradoxes, and discontinuity in the memory performance, without giving away the quest for continuity and identity. Such a memory space is central in order to appropriate a traumatic past and to open up its resources. It is also a vital element in engaging the memory performance with religious and political discourses in the context of its production as well as reception. In the usually patrilinear genealogies this dynamic is intimately linked to gender: gender plays a key role for fissures, gaps, and paradoxes to become manifest. It functions as a prism for both complexity and subversion and, hence, for this crucial memory space to emerge and to be played out