“But I Have No Recollection…”: Representations of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw

Abstract

ABSTRACT Arnold Schoenberg’s 1947 A Survivor from Warsaw relates a traumatic experience through the eyes of the titular narrator, frequently meditating on the theme of disrupted memory. This article draws on medical research and the pathology of PTSD as presented in Holocaust survivors. The simultaneous decline of conscious memory and increase in unconscious memory that emerges from medical research is represented in Schoenberg’s textual and compositional structure, particularly in the use of aggregate rows. It posits a new interpretation of the work as communicating both the events endured by survivors and its attendant effects on memory.