AustLit

'EVEN AS I UNCOVER materials that suggest Renate's appearance - a portrait of her sister on an East Berlin balcony in 1961, prisoner records from age sixteen till liberation, a Hollerith card that catalogues her physical features - she remains stubbornly abstract, a dream that can't be retrieved. I scan the women photo-graphed at the Mauthausen subcamp and the summer women displaced in southern Italy though I can't possibly recognise the one I'm looking for - Renate Grau. She's an assemblage of Nazi documents, a set of symptoms in a reparations claim, one name on the postwar lists of survivors and displaced persons. Who can make a person from such traces? Despite this scarcity, despite five years of searching, I'm driven to discover more. Sometimes I'm unsure if I'm summoning Renate - an obscuring aura that heralds a migraine, an unquantifiable sensory fact. Sometimes our positions reverse and I feel my self dissipate as her form materialises out of the past. Then I'm haunted, in the ways Avery Gordon describes it, as unresolved social violence erupts directly or obliquely, and `...home becomes unfamiliar...your bearings on the world lose direction...the over-and-done-with comes alive...what's been in your blind field comes into view.'  (Introduction)