The short story Out of Sight, Out of Mind is at its core about German amnesia regarding the holocaust and explores this phenomenon by leaning into the surreal and using a blend of English and German. The central symbol is the relationship between the orphaned narrator and a deceased mother, the mother representing the repressed memories of victims of the second world war and the narrator being a part of the society that has created the culture of disregard for the country’s history. However, I wrote this piece with the intent of keeping it open to many interpretations and have purposefully tried to keep it as abstract as possible while simultaneously giving the reader enough clues to figure out the general metaphor. Some of the feedback I have gotten interpreted the mother as a symbol for the complex love regarding one’s country and her earrings as a sign of falseness and materialism, while others saw both the narrator and the mother as an extended metaphor about fascism with the main lesson being that fascism won’t stay dead. This critical reflection contextualises the short story by drawing parallels to the use of vernacular in Junot Díaz’s short story “Drown” and the themes in Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians.

Junot Díaz’s use of Spanish and more specifically Dominican Republic slang has been one of the main inspirations for my personal use of translanguaging within Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Díaz’s use of Spanish words is sparse, as there are only about fourteen words distributed among seventeen pages, and most of them are insults and slurs in Spanish. The chances that the average anglophone reader understands words such as “pato” (Díaz 91), “sinvergüenzas” (Díaz 92) and “puto sucios” (Díaz 93) are slim, and understanding the deeper layers of meaning and their cultural significance are even slimmer. Even though the story seems easily accessible for the anglophone reader, the use of translanguaging creates a culture specific inclusivity. An important example of that is when the narrator calls his former best friend a “pato” (Díaz 91), which is a slur against homosexuals, early in the text, giving the Spanish speaking reader a clear hint towards the point of reveal at the end of the story: the sexual encounter between the narrator and said friend. I applied the same strategy in my own short story by quickly revealing to the German speaker that Monica is an orphan using the German word “Waisenkind” (1) and including that she is living in “Kinderheim St. Stürmer” (1), which translates to orphanage, and is, like many aspects, left open for interpretation whether she is one of the children in the orphanage or works there as a caregiver. The information that she is an orphan does get revealed later in the story for the anglophone reader, but by giving a German clue, like Díaz’s “pato”, creates this sense of inclusivity for German speakers.

            Díaz’s interplay between English and Spanish portrays the importance of language by using it as a form of communicating culture. As a Dominican Republic immigrant, the protagonist is living in the United States of America and balancing his Spanish speaking community with the anglophone environment. In my short story the connection between the two languages is less socially and geographically based, but rather signifies the repression of a time period. As the memories collected by a culture return to the protagonist, she starts remembering the previously repressed language too, showing the closely intertwined relationship between history and language. While Díaz regularly uses Spanish words in indirect dialogue, such as in “It’s a Goddamn miraclevilla, she cries” (95) showing that the Spanish vocabulary is a substantial part of conversation, the German in my short story is exclusively part of the internal narration, apart from two lines of dialogue between Monica and Boerne:

            “Und? Was nun? Oh, sorry, what do you want me to do with her?”

            “Verbrenn sie. Sie hätte es so gewollt. I’ll take the ashes with me.“ (6)

Boerne asks Monica in German, revealing that Monica is not the only person who has knowledge of the repressed memories. Furthermore, he acknowledges speaking German as a mistake signifying that speaking German in this created culture of repression is something forbidden or shameful. Monica responds “Burn her. She would have wanted it that way” in German creating a moment of understanding between the two characters. She then switches back to English. After that interaction, the remaining part of the piece is written in English, which could be interpreted as a renewed active repression of the memories or, tied in with the earrings as a symbol for her cultural heritage, as a calculated plan to not arouse suspicion.

            While Díaz exclusively uses intrasentential code-switching, I decided to use intrasentential and intersentential code-switching. In the beginning German is used intrasententially, hinting towards a hidden understanding of the language. Towards the climax when she meets the mother and is overcome by traumatic memories, there is intersentential codeswitching using multiple sentences in German. The memories bring the language back to life. Even though the anglophone reader has the option to translate those sentences, there are two instances that have multiple layers of meaning, easily detectable for the German reader. The first one is the sentence “Sie wollte mit Ihnen begraben werden” (5), which translates to ‘She wanted to be buried with them’, the ‘them’ referring to the earrings. However, the word ‘Ihnen’ is capitalised, which means it refers to a person and alludes towards an interpretation in which she did not want to be buried with the earrings but with a group of people instead. This is a subtle hint towards the theme of community versus the individual and could potentially change the meaning of Monica stealing the earrings. Yet, for the anglophone reader to not get alienated, the story still makes sense without translating or understanding any German. As part of the purpose of the story is to shed a light onto the conflict regarding Holocaust remembrance discussed in Germany to people in other countries, not alienating them is crucial. Another instance that might confuse non-Germans, is the phrase “sie waren dieselben, nicht die Gleichen” (5), which gets translated within the text. However, there is a difference: ‘dieselben’means that whatever it refers to is the exact same thing, while ‘die Gleichen’ refers to things that look the same but are two separate things. This could result in various interpretations for the reader. A German speaker might see this is a confirmation that the mother figure has some personal connection to Monica, whereas a non-German speaker could see it as a form of contemplation; a part of Monica’s conscious that is trying to decide whether she recognises those earrings.

            Not only does the linguistic proficiency of the reader play a role in understanding the piece, but also their knowledge of historical events. The piece is set on November 9th, a day that holds massive historical significance and is commonly known as ‘Kristallnacht’ (literally translated “crystal night”) or ‘The Night of Broken Glass’. It was the first instance in which Jews were arrested for no other reason than their religion and resulted in as many as 30,000 arrests. Even though this is common knowledge for most people who studied history in the German school system, this might be less obvious for others. This event gets alluded to later in Michael’s monologue: “This leaves so much room for crystal-clear brand-new ideas” (2), 'crystal’ referring ‘crystal night’ the English word ‘brand’ meaning ‘fire’ in German. However, the historical knowledge and understanding German are not essential to understanding the story, but rather adds depth for the reader to figure out. Inspired by Díaz, the translanguaging provides extra information for the German reader that provide multiple levels of meaning without alienating the English reader.

Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians uses a vernacular that forms a contrast to Díaz’s and my work. The density in her writing and the stream of consciousness thinking, left little room for the reader’s interpretation of the text, which was something I tried to avoid in my piece. The focus in Out of Sight, Out of Mind is the central metaphor, which should encourage the reader to critically think and assess. Hiding the metaphor further by using incomplete sentence structures and non-conforming punctuation, like McBride does on many instances (examples are “He shouts Christ! when he Stop.” (15) and “Laughing Those were a mission.” (66)) would take the focus away from the metaphor.

            However, her female centric approach, and how she seems to give up on it halfway through when the male love interest gets a 68 page long quasi monologue, fascinated me. In my short story I made the deliberate choice to have a female protagonist and a deceased mother, even though the more obvious connection to the holocaust could potentially be a male father, due to Germany being referred to as “Vaterland” (eng. “fatherland”) by Germans. This choice resulted partially because I was intrigued by the physical connection between the mother’s C-Section scar and then linking that to the simile about the pregnant woman and foetus on the first page. The other reason for using a mother figure was that the memories about the second world war, stem from stories my deceased grandmother used to tell us about her experience as a young girl and it personally felt unnatural to give her stories to a male figure, who people might interpret as Hitler. However, similarly to McBride, my male secondary characters (Michael and Boerne) play a more important role than the female ones (Maria and the receptionist). While the abstract atmosphere of the story rarely allows for flashed out character descriptions, the female secondary characters are reduced to their physical appearance. This alludes to a heavily patriarchal world; a world that is stuck in a past without any glimpse of a social reform, due to the lack of remembrance of their past.

            The wider German discussion regarding the holocaust, German guilt and our ‘Culture of Remembrance’ is constantly present in German society. For this short story, I did some research on a specific historic discussion about the German guilt called ‘Historikerstreit’. One of the prominent figures being Michael Stürmer, a conservative historian, who had the opinion that Germany had no choice but to transform to a dictatorship because of its geographical location and that the Germans have made penances into a mere ritual without questioning their legitimacy. Michael in the short story is in many ways formed after Michael Stürmer, at one point even repeating a sentence that Stürmer wrote: “Everything is possible in a country without history.” (Stürmer). Like in The Lesser Bohemians the female protagonist Monica is not enough to work against the patriarchal frames and the overpowering importance of a man’s words. A contrast is formed by Stürmer ambition to ignore the past, while the male love interest in McBride’s novel opens up and re-tells the narrator and the reader the story of a life full of trauma. However, both results in a similar conclusion: history is something dominated by men who are trying to forget their past mistakes while keeping their current position of power.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind started as a study of German vernacular and the close connection between language and history and ended up being about a theme so overpowering it could fill a novel. I took inspiration from Díaz’s “Drown” and his intricate creation of deeper layers of meaning and hints for Spanish speaking readers. In addition, reading Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians lead to an examination of gender, specifically the male characters and their roles within my short story. Ultimately, this story is brief insight into a surreal world trying to depict a controversial stance on the discussion of German guilt, written, not to give a verdict, but to start a through-process, using translanguaging as a tool to not alienate the anglophone reader while inviting the German reader to an exclusive point of entry towards the story.

            © Anna Diedrichsen 2024

 Works Cited

Primary Sources

Díaz, Junot. Drown. Riverhead Books, New York, New York, 1996, pp. 91–107. 

McBride, Eimear. The Lesser Bohemians. Paperback edition., Faber & Faber, 2017.

Secondary Sources

“Kristallnacht.” Holocaust Encyclopaedia , United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024. 

Li Wei, Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language, Applied Linguistics, Volume

39, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 9–30, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039

Stürmer, Michael. “Ein Land Ohne Erinnerung.” Deutschlandfunk Kultur, deutschlandfunkkultur.de, 17 Sept. 2006, www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/ein-land-ohne-erinnerung-100.html.