- Title
- Getting here
- Creator
- Raine, Danuta Electra
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- In January, 2009, as part of my research for this award, I discovered my mother had been born in a Nazi concentration camp for the extermination of Slavic infants. The following Palm Sunday, I was the first descendant of a Polish infant survivor to have visited the site of the Frauen Entbindungslager, Birth and Abortion Camp, in Waltrop, Recklinghausen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. I shared communion with a predominantly octogenarian congregation that been young men and women in 1943, some of them the residents of this German Catholic town when it enforced the fates of the pregnant Slav workers. Nearly seventy years after my mother’s escape, I became the custodian of a story I should never have been born to tell. Although more a piece of literary fiction than an autobiographical novel, >>The Glass Mountain<< engages with family stories to explore the depth, transference and healing of trauma across four generations as it weaves between the contemporary Australian lives of Kaz and her autistic 17 year old son, Jason, and the experiences of Zuitka and her infant daughter, Julka, in Germany during the last years of WWII. In 2011, Christophe Laue from the Herford Archive, Herford, North Rhine-Westphalia emailed Nazi documents relating to my mother, as well as an historical book and a museum program in which she is named. Scholars have asked, “What happened to Danuta Anita?” The exegesis, >>The Legacy of Danuta Anita<<, responds to this while exploring practice led research in creative projects involving intergenerational trauma and migration. It engages with the researcher as subject, authorial authenticity and performativity, the science and literature of trauma and intergenerational (transgenerational) trauma, the unreliability of memory in researching trauma narratives, the origins and ongoing influences of eugenics, infanticide and genocide, and the complexities of representing trauma and autism in literature.
- Subject
- intergenerational Trauma; genocide; traumatic affect; migrants in Newcastle, NSW; Waltrop Birth and Abortion Centre; Frauen Entbildungslager Waltrop; Nazi policy; forced labour in Germany WWII; Polish forced labour; momen and children in war; Herford forced labour; Danuta Anita; practice led research; trauma; creative writing; post World War II diaspora in Australia; European migration; autism; trauma fiction; transgenerational trauma fiction
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1310490
- Identifier
- uon:22045
- Rights
- This thesis is currently under embargo and will be available from 04.08.2019, Copyright 2015 Danuta Electra Raine
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Exegesis | 422 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |