Mats Staub calls himself a story collector. The stories he collects are personal memories that mirror history. The memories are Erinnerungen ans Erwachsenwerden or "memories of growing up" and the storytellers are "ordinary" people, that is, people like you and me talking about their transition to adulthood.
These ordinary people include young people from, for example: Germany, South Africa and Austria. Mats talked to, amongst others, actresses and butchers, immigrants and to people now retired. Their stories are not well-rehearsed stories that they have told 100 times before. These are people searching for words, structuring and assessing and narrating on the hoof.
Three months later, Mats visits the interviewees again and shows them the edited film of their reminiscences. At the same time, Mats films the reactions on the listeners faces. What we see is not people telling stories from their pasts, but people listening to themselves tell stories from their pasts. Their responses to listening to themselves range from smiles and giggles to tears, from gestures of pride to immersion in thought.
Such an "exhibition" is invaluable to the writer. The theme of memory and reality is a rich seam to mine and so is the association between memory and identity. For example, understanding a character can often depend on that particular person's way of remembering and interpreting his or her own past. For example, the protagonists in Katzuo Ishiguro's novels When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go create their identities from interpretation of their childhood memories.
And what of collective memory? For example, where I live in Germany there are many Vertriebeneverein or "refugee associations" set up by, for example, the Sudetenland Germans who were thrown out of their homeland in 1945/46 and obliged to make new homes for themselves in post WW2 Germany. Although members of these clubs are gradually dwindling, I recognise the accent when I hear these displaced people speaking to one another in bars, in the changing-room of the gym and in the sauna. It is clear to me that they still see themselves as different and have kept their culture and traditions alive through music, stories and a collective experiences of being unwanted refugees in Germany in 1946. At that time, there were around 12,000,000 of these people. They came, not only from the Sudetenland, but also from Hungary, The Baltic states, Poland and parts of the ex-Soviet Union. Their collective memories form a vital part of their identities and that continues to this day. I have written about them in my novel Lost Property - now available on all Amazon stores.
Comments