Jonas Müller-Laackman
- Freie Universität Berlin
- PhD –project at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies
- E-mail: jonas.mueller-laackman(at)fu-berlin.de
Short CV
After obtaining the BA at Freie Universität Berlin, I finished the MA of Arabic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Universiteit Leiden with an MA-thesis about the psychotraumatological reading of the famous poem Dār al-ʿUqayla by Rajab Ḥamad Būḥwayš al-Minifī as well as the theoretical conception of a concentration camp as a traumatizing entity. This topic is also subject to my PhD-project at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, where I work on psychotraumatological readings of Arabic Lagerliteratur.
My research project is about pychotraumatological readings of Lagerliteratur that was produced by internees in geographically non-European, respectively colonial, concentration camps. My main focus lies on the camps in colonial Libya under the Italian fascists; I aim to incorporate the literature from these camps into the already existing rich corpus of European Lagerliteratur and its respective academic discourses. While following Agamben's conception of the concentration camp as the location and manifestation of the state of exception, I rely on traumatological approaches that hopefully will allow me to develop a hermeneutic of suffering and thereby gain access to the suffering Self, which expresses its trauma through literature. This expression, as I understand it in the context of my work, does not primarily address someone else, but the Self itself, for by articulating what is not to be articulated, the Self gets to deal with the own, traumatizing experiences. My methodology tries to uncover the underlying mechanisms and aims to listen to the suffering Self. The main focus therefore lies on the subjective human experience of suffering in the context of the dehumanization in concentration camps and how it is expressed in and dealt with through Lagerliteratur. Furthermore, I hope to be able to develop an approach that is sensitive regarding post-colonial matters and avoids, as well as deconstructs, hierarchies of suffering that might exist in the analysis of non-European suffering from a European perspective, especially in the context of concentration camps – for Europe's societies themselves are still struggling to find an appropriate way of accounting for their own past.