Language and Implication in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Essay “Der Große Hunger und das lange Schweigen” (2023) [Sprache und Implikation in Sasha Marianna Salzmanns Aufsatz “Der Große Hunger und das lange Schweigen” (2023)]

Abstract

This paper examines the theme of silence in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s essay “Der Große Hunger und das lange Schweigen” in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In their essay, Salzmann examines this invasion in the context of their own long unawareness of Ukrainian history, stemming from the silences within their Russian-speaking Soviet-Ukrainian family. Salzmann weaves reflections on language and its potential to harbor murderous silences into their diagnosis of contemporary Russia’s festering ailment: the amputation, imposed by the regime, of historical memory for the sake of an ideologically expedient narrative. Salzmann juxtaposes what can be interpreted as fragile “postmemory” and a monumentalizing mnemopolitics, which exemplifies what Timothy Snyder has called Russia’s “politics of eternity”—an ideological strategy that suppresses human plurality and finitude through a static, binary framework. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concepts of “multidirectional memory” and “the implicated subject,” this paper traces patterns of implication in Salzmann’s account, conditioned by their positionality as a Jewish person with a post-Soviet, Russian-Ukrainian background writing in German.