Dádiva e Emoção - CCHLA - Universidade Federal da Paraíba

Holocaust Residues
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In an interview intended to reconstruct her life
history, the issue of the grey light popped up by chance.
Ana said “I saw lots of grey light this morning in the train
… their faces were as usual very icy”. From this
statement, I hypothesized that grey light could well be a
myriad of energetic forces. Thus, I deduced that it was
not Holocaust victims who were affected by this
substance. I began wondering what sort of illuminating
parallelism there could be between dead Holocaust victims
and the groups of workers she encountered every day
when catching the early-morning train at Friedrichsein.
Strangely, the very figure of grey light or grey air carried
by the train through the city evokes images of Jews being
rounded up and transported to the concentration camps
during the Second World War.
After several sporadic meetings with Ana, her
tendency to displace the meaning of the term grey light,
shifting it indifferently from the petrified faces of office
workers at the Friedrichsein and the seemingly lifeless
streetwalking Prenzlauerberg inhabitants in the present to
the victims of the Holocaust became a recurrent feature.
It was not sufficient to argue that Ana’s multiple
articulation of this transubstantiating energy was a way of
resisting the traumatic affliction of the war memories.
Neither was it plausible to dismiss this energetic issue by
approaching this magical theme in terms of esoteric
superstition. Strolling through Oranienburgerstrasse, Ana
made the following claim “… the faces of the citizens are
very cold,… it is customary to think it is due to the
weather,… but I believe it has to do with the way in which
the grey light (of the Holocaust), impresses our faces,…
you can see its forces very clearly in the train”.
Ana informed me that melancholic places such as
the emaciated urban landscape of the old parts of Mitte,
characterized by old striated facades, military traces of
the Second World War and the GDR ruins were precisely
where this grey light dwelled most intensively.
Significantly, she occasionally referred to this flowing
energy as fuelling the spirits of dead people who may
inhabit such indeterminate and decaying environments.
When trying to discern the arbitrary grey light, she used
words such as impression and heaviness. According to
Ana’s perceptual constellation, the vibrant and pulsating
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