Anatomy of Memory in Vera Wollenberger’s Virus der Heuchler

Memory is intimately related to the body. Visual, sensorial, tactile sensations activate neurons of the brain before the latter stores these various pieces of information in mental archives called the memory. Scientists and psychologists alike have long been fascinated by the memory archives. As academics studied and then mapped the different regions of the brains they established that each of the brain zones possesses specific storage functions, like the short or long term memory, the involuntary memory, the false memory, the voluntary memory and the autobiographical memory, to name just a few.

It still remains a mystery to unveil the exact processes by which the brain functions and through which mechanisms the soul employs the brain to travel into one’s life virtually, trying to remember the context of events and re-organize thoughts, perceptions and sensations of various experiences. It remains certain however, that memory offers a bridge to the past. With the eyes of memory, the visions of earlier periods in one’s life become at times blurry or even more lucid. Memory zones function in this sense as archeological sites where individuals sometimes have to dig quite deep in order to recover the past. But once those memory sites are open, just like the archeological ones, memories become contaminated by the present retrospective on those events and the consequences of some actions mainly because the current new knowledge was not accessible at the time of the past events. But memory too has its limits. As Alfred Jarry said, forgetting is the essential function of memory. The action of forgetting turns off the lights of selected episodes of the past that the voluntary memory wishes to edit especially in reason of negative emotions or stress.

What if another person wrote the body of your life in an official document like a file? Memory then takes another dimension because passages in a file virtually take any individual to spaces of his/her past. The written observations shed light on the past again and force the memory to open its eyes on the story of one’s life, to let itself transported in this time machine and land onto lost or new sites of memory.

This current research intends to analyze the anatomy of memory of people who attempt to write their autobiography after their own spaces of memory have been contaminated by the reading of their Stasi files. I will evaluate how different types of memory collaborate in this process of constructing the story of one’s life by exploring both personal and official sites of memory. This research will illustrate examples of the various concepts and theories of memory taking the example of Vera Wollenberger’s autobiographical work Virus der Heuchler: Innenansicht aus Stasi-Akten.