Dusklands

The article investigates a visual dossier of the transnational history of violence that Coetzee created while working on Dusklands. Special attention will be paid to a number of images depicting Nazi atrocities committed in Central Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s which have so far failed to attract the attention of Coetzee scholarship due to their incongruence with the rest of the Dusklands research materials. The paper will argue that the images testify to the Central European genealogy of Coetzee’s investigation of various forms of imperialist oppression and that their presence in the writer’s archive is essential to Coetzee’s (and Dusklands’s) project of bridging various colonial/imperial temporalities, geographies, and atrocities, as well as its exploration of the relationship between the photographer and the traumatic events which the latter is about to record. Finally, the article considers the analysed images the manifestations of Dusklands’s “potential” Central European history – the book’s unrealised Central European project

Cold war · Nazism · Oppression · Scholarship · Central European national history · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · South African History and Culture