Staging Memories of Forced Migration in Jan Klata’s Transfer!
Staging Memories of Forced Migration in Jan Klata’s Transfer!

Summary/Abstract: This article undertakes a close reading of Jan Klata’s Polish-German theatre project Transfer! (2006), interrogating its underlying aims and assumptions with a focus on how the director’s intricate montage of primary testimonies (performed onstage by German and Polish witnesses to the migrations and their aftermath), projected text and images, and the ‘chorus’ of actors playing historical figures (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin) variously enables or forecloses the re-imagining of dominant tropes of national memory. Using a dialogical framework elaborated from Polish and German critical memory discourses, the article traces the possibilities that the staging of diverse narratives of forced migration might present for advancing shared Polish-German understandings of the historical past, with particular reference to the mixed reception of Transfer! in the two neighbouring countries.

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