The Persistence of Memory: Text and Image in the Art of Arnold Daghani
May 7, 2009 by Deborah Schultz
Filed under Art
According to those who knew him best, the artist Arnold Daghani (1909–1985) had an exceptionally retentive memory for events, names, dates and places. For him, as for other survivors, memory became what Laurence Langer, in his study Holocaust Testimonies, calls an ‘insomniac faculty’, implying that the process of remembering is not one of reviving memories, for ‘there is no need to revive what has never died’. What makes Daghani’s commemorative works distinctive is that they combine words and images in such varied, complex ways. Although he created visual images without words and wrote texts without images, he would often use written inscription to heighten the visual impact of an image — a parallel discourse rather than an explanation — in much the same way as he would set an image in counterpoint to text.
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Deborah Schultz is Research Fellow in the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, Department of History, University of Sussex. She is co-editor with Professor Edward Timms, of Arnold Daghani’s Memories of Mikhailowka: The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009) and co-author with Edward Timms, of Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani (London: Routledge, 2009) first published as a special issue of Word & Image, vol. 24, no. 3 (July–September 2008).
The Arnold Daghani Collection is housed at the University of Sussex. To visit contact library.specialcoll@sussex.ac.uk or phone 01273 678157.
