Dreamt return to the homeland surfaced guilt at foreign occupation
Evidence
For eight years, he had tried to forget the mountains of memory, pained as he was by their postwar transformation; he had sought what meaning he could in his new life in the West. Now he l ew back in a dream to his “beloved little city in which I know every path, every street, where all the people are intimate to me.” But unlike the idyllic journeys of von Buttlar or even Roth, every house was “foreign and drained,” and when he waved to his parents’ house, “it stood mute and cold, it didn’t look at me, it was so foreign.” Without knowledge of its actual contemporary appearance, he saw the brick house as fully intact as before; but then “with horror” he realized that “the house had died, like a person its soul had separated from it, had l own away, and what stood here was only the lifeless, stony body, the cold walls within which foreign people now live.” — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 864
Categorization
- XREF: The imagined ‘lifeless house’ analogy — a place whose soul has departed — is evocative for the reader’s work on attachment decay as an interior process rather than external policy shift. — connects to: Colonized subjects’ dreams encode a warning to stay in their assigned place.; The Allies offloaded Holocaust survivors and their guilt onto the Arab world — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 989; A dream’s meaning shifts when read against broader colonial social context. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 359
Broader Connections
- Colonized subjects’ dreams encode a warning to stay in their assigned place.
#expands(0.80) - The Allies offloaded Holocaust survivors and their guilt onto the Arab world
#expands(0.75) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 989 - A dream’s meaning shifts when read against broader colonial social context.
#expands(0.75) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 359