Although I am not an artist nor an expert in any way, I have a very strong faith in art, tremendous respect for artists and those who enable and convey art in so many different ways. I feel privileged to be able to make a small contribution to that with my work as a translator. Admittedly, some artists and art projects feel closer, mean more to me personally than others, but I am in an extremely fortunate position to be able to become at least somewhat acquainted with work that I might otherwise not have been aware of.

The past two years of my life, a very painful and difficult period for me personally, have been accompanied by an art project that has been precious to me, powerful, thought-provoking, challenging, and surprisingly healing. I want to try to describe what this project has meant to me – not as a review or scholarly discussion, as I am neither an art critic nor a scholar, but simply as an expression of gratitude to the artist Franz Wassermann and in memory of my beloved sister Amy.

Teddy Bear

Franz Wassermann first contacted me in late September 2008. At that time, I had only just returned from a traumatic and sudden trip to the US following my sister’s decision to end her life. After clearing out my sister’s apartment and taking care of all the strange formalities that a sudden death entails, I set out from Michigan, where my sister had lived, together with two of my brothers and my younger son, on a bizarre and surreal “road trip” to take a part of my sister’s ashes to my terminally ill mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After coming home to Austria from New Mexico, I was still numb with shock for some time. The translation I did for Franz then was the first work I did after my return, perhaps the only work I could have done at that point. As it was, it was another kind of shock, but probably what I needed to “unfreeze” my brain and start coming back to life again.

When Franz first wrote to me, he said that my friend, the artist Renee Stieger had recommended me as a translator, and for me, that recommendation was an important one. I have long enjoyed, admired and respected Renee’s work as an artist, and on several occasions I have even contributed some of my own stories, which she has woven into art works with great skill and care with beautiful results. I trust her. If she thought that Franz and I could and should work together, then I was certainly willing to trust her judgment. Nevertheless, when I read the first text that Franz sent to me, it immediately set off all kinds of alarms ringing in my mind.

The short text, intended for a public call via postcards, posters and mass media, was an invitation to people affected by abuse in their childhood or youth to donate objects associated with that experience to be exhibited in an installation in public space. The mention of toys and cuddly animals immediately evoked a vivid mental image of my son’s teddy bear.

When my elder son was about three years old, it was not a particularly happy or easy time in his life. When he was a year old, he had started going to a “day-care mother”, where he loved spending the mornings playing with other children. When he was two, he had to stop going there, because there are not enough child-care places in Austria, so the few places available are necessarily reserved for the children of working mothers (yes, working mothers). Since I was on maternity leave with the second child, I was technically not working, so my first child was dropped from the day-care program. This left him unhappily stuck at home with the mysterious, demanding and perplexing little creature that was his newborn brother and an unhappy mother feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by the situation. By the time my elder son started kindergarten at the age of three, he had lost much of his ability to speak German, his social skills were underdeveloped, and he felt frustrated and angry, because he could not express himself. A three-year-old has limited possibilities for expressing anger and frustration, but many – if not most or even all of them – seem to involve demanding attention with senseless actions that are dangerous and/or extremely messy. The way that these kinds of actions are not accessible through rational discussion only enhances their effectiveness.

In this context, I found myself one unhappy afternoon on the top bunk bed wildly removing the sheets from my son’s bed, furiously picking up one cuddly toy after another and hurling it furiously against the opposite wall. Finally, the only one left was my son’s beloved teddy bear: the teddy bear that had accompanied him all over the world since it was given to him in Paris when he was nine weeks old, his constant and comforting companion, as only a cherished teddy bear can be. When I picked up the teddy bear and looked at it, I reached a crucial limit. I could no more hurl the teddy bear against the wall than I could the child himself. The symbolism of that was so unbearably painful. With my unhappy, confused child watching perplexed from the safety of the floor, where I had left him, I curled up in the mess of his bed with his teddy bear and just sobbed and sobbed for what seemed like an eternity.

The painful humiliation of an experience like that, the terrible shock of recognizing how close I could come to hurting my beloved child, this small and wonderful human being completely dependent on me in every way, was something that I could only share with my sister. In fact, she teased me about it for years afterwards; it became almost a kind of code or symbolic expression of our shared endeavor to cope with motherhood despite all our doubts in our ability to be “good” mothers. When my sister’s son was two years old, she came to Europe with him to visit me (with my then newborn son) and our brother and sister-in-law in England, who were also trying to figure out parenting. Traveling around Europe as a single mother with a two-year-old is hard work. At some point, trying to negotiate crossing a busy street between cars and trams in a foreign city with a tired, inattentive two-year-old lacking a sense of danger, my sister pulled the child’s hand too hard and dislocated his shoulder. It was not a serious injury, but having to take a child to the emergency room at a hospital in a country where you don’t understand the language is inevitably a harrowing experience, even if you have a sympathetic brother-in-law to translate for you. And the shame and humiliation of actually being responsible for that injury was something that continued to haunt my sister for the rest of her life. Faced with all the conventional prejudices against single mothers, my sister was a wonderful mother, who did an excellent job raising her son, but she was never able to forget that she once hurt him.

At some level, I still want to blame someone else for these experiences that my sister and I shared. I remember being stuck on a street corner with two small children, helpless with fury that not a single car would stop to let us cross. I wanted to scream with rage, because mothers are universally held responsible for how they raise their children, but how could my sons learn to respect and trust their mother, when they experienced every damned day how little respect I received from anyone else? A woman with small children becomes invisible in everyday society, too unimportant to even be allowed to cross the street, unwelcome in public transportation and buildings, where steps and barriers preclude entry with an overloaded buggy and a toddler in tow. The most trivial errands require careful planning and huge exertion, and it is exhausting. But when we reach our limits, when we pass the point of being able to cope, when we “snap” – we become monsters, the most despicable of human beings.

When I first read the “call” for Franz Wassermann’s project Narben/Scars, I panicked. I remembered my son’s teddy bear, my nephew’s dislocated shoulder, and I desperately wanted to talk to my sister about it, because I was afraid this would be yet another reproach, yet another humiliation like so many others found again and again in mass media, yet another condemnation of “bad parents” without questioning the context, the circumstances, the unremitting pressure. But on the strength of Renee’s recommendation, I looked up what I could find about Franz’s previous work, and based on what I found, I made the conscious – and ultimately right – decision to trust him. And silently, in my imagination, I added my son’s teddy bear to the other contributions to the project.

It turned out to be a safe, respectful and healing imaginary home for the teddy bear.

The Parents of Children Are Always the Children of Parents

At some point in the course of 2009, the responses to Narben/Scars from visitors, participants, contributors that Franz sent me to translate, all seemed to confirm that my decision to trust him was right. Somewhere in the course of 2009 I got lost. Crucial, life-changing occurrences passed almost unnoticed. By the end of April that year, my sons came to the end of secondary school and finished their last day of classes before embarking on the long series of final exams.

The day after that, one of their classmates hanged himself.

The day after that, the traditional May 1st parade was disrupted by police violence unprecedented and unheard of in Linz.

The day after that, my mother asked me again – plaintively, helplessly, hopelessly – why she still hadn’t died yet.

I had the feeling the world had gone pear-shaped. Nothing made sense. Every possible framework for attempting to set priorities seemed to have been smashed to bits. My old self, the self that had been actively involved in cultural and local politics for so many years, automatically went to work frantically trying to translate press releases and information for the spontaneously formed “Alliance Against Police Violence” as quickly as possible. My “mothering self” was rushing around to try to gather together all the kids I had known and loved for years, who were all shocked, hurt, frightened by their classmate’s decision. Again I desperately needed to talk to my sister, to ask for her advice as a professional about how to help these kids in this situation, despite the irony of that need. My “daughter self” fell into a dark and endlessly deep well of despair, because there was nothing, nothing, nothing I could do for my mother, and I was ashamed of my feelings of anger and resentment toward her – not least of all for making me feel like a cold-hearted monster, because I could not comfort her.

Somewhere in the course of 2009, Franz and I had exchanged a series of emails trying to calculate costs, budgets and possible funding for a publication to document and continue the project Narben/Scars. At some point he told me glumly that he was unlikely to be able to get anything close to the needed funding. I assured him then that I didn’t care whether my work could be paid or not. The project had become too important to me; something as trivial as money (or a lack thereof) could not influence my decision to remain involved at least marginally and continue translating the texts for the publication. Unfortunately, of course that meant that I had to make sure I was still generating enough income with other translations, which meant that far too often I left Franz waiting for me to finish each next text, holding up subsequent work on the publication, and I am still grateful for his patience and encouragement. I was finding it increasingly difficult to work at all, and sometimes the Narben/Scars texts were the only translations I could even do. Trying to find words to convey other people’s pain seemed to help, when I could find no words for my own pain.

In the course of what felt like an endless series of bizarre infections, when every tiny scratch seemed to end up requiring dramatic bandages, antibiotics and countless visits to our family doctor, that summer I stupidly injured my thumb, which left me unable to even type with a cast on my hand. Especially startling was the realization that I had hurt my thumb trying to keep my clothes from slipping off, which finally made me aware of how much weight I had been losing. Not only had I not been sleeping well for months, I hadn’t been eating either. Trying to force myself to remember to eat, even though I felt no hunger, seemed to require tremendous effort, and none of that alleviated the sleeping problems. Overwhelmed with the effort of just getting by, unable to work, I found myself slipping more and more into a dark cloud. As I seemed to be unable to tear myself away from endless web sites about suicide methods and forums for “survivors”, people whose loved ones had chosen to end their lives, I couldn’t seem to stop crying – for hours and hours, days on end, for what felt like an eternity.

As stupid and useless as I felt, though, there were still people who amazingly offered sympathy, understanding, patience, encouragement: the friend who wisely assured me that crying can be like a craving for chocolate cake, and sometimes you just have to indulge yourself until you’ve had enough; all the people who sent articles to me and told me their own stories; my husband, who was so patient and gentle. One day my elder son put his arms around me and told me comfortingly, “Of course it’s hard. There’s no way that this could ever have been easy. That’s just the way it is now.” And suddenly I realized that my son, who had been such a difficult three-year-old, had – despite all my inadequacies as a mother – become a compassionate, caring young man.

With the feeling that I was becoming too much of a burden to my husband, sons and friends, and with more support and encouragement, I finally made the difficult decision to seek professional support from a therapist as well. When I arrived at the therapist’s office and realized that she works primarily with child protection centers and with abused and emotionally damaged children, I didn’t even want to sit down. I objected that she had far more important things to do and shouldn’t waste her time with someone like me, just self-absorbed and silly. She persuaded me to stay.

As I set out on another journey to try to understand why I could not comfort my mother, what had led to the immense distance between us that it was too late to overcome, and what all of that might have to do with my sister, I felt another tremendous surge of gratitude to all the people who contributed to Narben/Scars. I still believe that the greatest strength of the project, a tribute to Franz Wassermann’s skill as an artist and simply as a compassionate, responsible, generous human being, is that the project does not draw boundaries. There is no “other” of victims and perpetrators of (sexualized) violence outside “normal” society. There are certainly very different degrees of suffering, some of them horrendous and unimaginable, yet the experience of being a sad, hurt, lonely child is so widespread and so common that a platform like this establishes a foundation for understanding, for solidarity, for mutual respect. There are no monsters. There are only people, and as human beings we are all fallible and vulnerable beings in need of one another in so many different ways.

One Lonely Oppy

In the course of translating texts for the Narben/Scars publication, I often felt frustrated by my lack of familiarity with terminology from all the relevant different fields. So often, I wished I could just call my sister and ask her to explain it to me. As an expert in special education for “behavior-disturbed” and emotionally damaged children, with a degree in law in addition to that, she could have explained everything to me that I needed to know for these translations. Lacking that valuable resource, I ended up doing extensive online research – and sometimes I felt completely overwhelmed by how much information is actually available, how many organizations there are all over the world that devote an incredible amount of energy and effort to helping hurt children. Small human beings can be so easily hurt; it requires so much effort to heal that hurt, or at least make it bearable, so that it may be possible to go on living at all.

In between, I kept returning to Franz’ web site, gazing again and again at the pictures of the objects displayed in the installation. One picture, in particular, went straight to my heart. It is a picture of a tiny cloth doll. The picture on the web site doesn’t necessarily convey how small this doll is, but I know that as well as I know my own hands. My younger son had a doll like that – but not just one, he had a whole horde of them. These dolls were produced in series, each one with a cloth body made of a different fabric with a matching hat. They came in tiny boxes with names like “Noppy”, “Poppy”, “Floppy”, so in my household they were collectively called the Oppies. The Oppies were essential to my son, who used them intensively to work through his fears and frustrations and confusion and wishes and needs.

Although my younger son had initially been very excited about starting school, he became increasingly unhappy over the course of the first year. In his second year at school he became more and more withdrawn, apathetic, losing interest in everything that had previously made him happy. When he reached the point of just spending hours and hours lying on the carpet staring at the ceiling, unreachable by almost any means, as his parents we had to admit that we needed help. I have no idea what I might have done then without my sister. I still have boxes full of articles she sent to me, long lists of links to helpful web sites, extensive email correspondence and memories of endless phone conversations. And there were visits back and forth, through which my sister and my son developed a very close, very special relationship. I remember her telling him about a conference, where she learned about Asperger’s Syndrome – and how she made him laugh with her vivid depiction of how hard it was for her to refrain from snickering at this academic conference, because instead of “Asperger”, she kept hearing “ass-burger”. On this basis, they had long and hilarious exchanges, until one day my son stood up and sternly announced “I don’t want to be an ass-burger!” It was also my sister who noticed the similarities between my son and my own childhood experiences, but at the same time, she never failed to warn me about confusing or conflating his experiences and mine.

Along with my sister, there were so many people, whose understanding and patience and willingness to engage at different levels helped my son find his way back into the company of other human beings. Like the countless Oppies who filled his play, his life was filled with a strong network of caring people. Looking at the one lonely Oppy in the Narben/Scars installation brought tears to my eyes. Every child needs a whole strong network of caring people, because anything else is just too lonely.

Of course, I don’t know who contributed this Oppy to the art project. I don’t know why they might have contributed it, what their story might be. Yet like all the objects in this project, as this little doll stands for a specific personal story, but without explicitly telling that story, it opens up a space for projections, for a sense of connection. For me, it suggests a possibility for solidarity among all the people who have ever known what it feels like to be a lonely child, a child that necessarily knows where the safe hiding places are, for all the myriad reasons – ranging from ordinary and commonplace to unimaginably horrific – that so many children need to know where safe hiding places are. And the one lonely Oppy feels like a reminder that no one can feel safe by themselves. We can only keep each other safe.

Writing in the Sand

Following my mother’s death in April 2010, last September I joined my brothers and my nephew again in the US to finally scatter my sister’s ashes on the second anniversary of her death. It surprised me how deeply comforting it felt to hold her ashes in my hands. After spreading several handfuls of the ashes in the sand and writing through them into the sand, I stood in the water and watched the gentle waves carry the traces away. I think death takes time, letting go takes time.

Yet “letting go” is such an odd phrase, a strange way of thinking. Of course, our own past, the stories that make up who we are do not “let go” of us. They remain a part of us – like the scars that mark our bodies and our souls as proof that we have lived and are living still. Standing in the water with the gentle waves washing around my ankles, I felt reminded that I was once, long ago, a child living near the ocean. A reserved, lonely, insecure child, I did not like to play in the waves, to splash or jump around or dive in. I liked to stand in the water and feel the waves move around my legs, no higher than my waist at most, just the rhythm of the sea, the calming, incessant back-and-forth of this living thing that is an ocean. Until I left my last home by the ocean once and for all, I especially liked to take long walks on the beach in the rain. The feeling of infinity, of this constant rhythm never failed to comfort and calm me. That same feeling carried away the last physical traces of my beloved little sister.

Never, ever again will I be able to touch my sister, never hug her, playfully push her, put my hand on her shoulder, never even hold the ashes of her body in my hands again. But she will always be a part of me – joyful, painful, unreachable, undeniable, lasting. I tried so hard to understand her journey, to trace her steps, to imagine how she felt. I tried to follow her path – sometimes almost too closely. Yet it is also a measure of how very safe, protected and sheltered I am that other people were paying attention, and they looked after me when I felt unable to function. With all my heart, I want everyone in the world to be that safe. Everyone needs to let someone else take care of them sometimes. We all need to take care of each other.

When Franz sent me letters of response to the installation Narben/Scars to translate, I first printed them out, then I read through them all. And then I just sat there and wept. Translating them was hard, but it felt important, valuable, necessary. Among these various responses was the story of a young woman, who was motivated by the calls for donations to the art project to share her story with people she gradually felt able to trust. In the end, the legal system had no resources left to deal with her story – “lack of evidence”, “statute of limitations” – and the man who had poisoned her youth was acquitted. At the end of her story, though, she said that no longer mattered. What mattered was that she was met with understanding and respect by those with whom she shared her story. That enabled her to say, “It’s all right. It’s over now.”

I have, to my knowledge, never met this woman. I have no idea who she is, I would not recognize her on the street. Through the art project Narben/Scars, however, I feel a connection with her, and I am deeply grateful for her words that also became a kind of mantra for me: “It’s all right. It’s over now.” When wounds heal, they leave scars. These scars are a reminder that something has changed, that something happened, something that cannot be undone. But we can live with scars. We just have to assure ourselves by assuring one another that scars are not blemishes, not marks of shame or failure. On the contrary, scars are the marks of survivors, and surviving is not easy – and no one can do it alone.

What Artists are Capable of

Sometimes I wonder what it might feel like to be an artist, to have the kind of insight, perception, understanding and skills to be able to open up spaces of possibility, a different way of looking at the world we live in, a space of imagining and one in which different kinds of connections become possible. I don’t know what that might feel like. I only know that I am deeply grateful to those who are willing and able to share that kind of gift. Because it matters. Because it can make a vital difference.

Danke Franz.