On the Gravel Track of History 2: Dreamscapes

Based on Elmiger’s narrative, the multi-award-winning writer Terézia Mora encounters the ‘trauma researcher’ Malek Bajbouj. Both explore, in different ways, traumatic experiences that often defy a normal, coherent narrative. Trauma is characterised precisely by the fact that an event cannot be easily integrated into a coherent story. How, then, can one tell of it? Trauma, violence and otherness are among the central themes in Terézia Mora’s work.

In books such as *Every Day*, *The Monster* and *Muna, or Half a Life*, she has translated the indescribable into language and the form of a text – and explored the limits of what can be depicted in literature. She is currently writing a book whose starting point is a family trauma linked to the expulsion of her German-speaking family from Hungary. Malek Bajbouj is a psychiatrist and neurologist who frequently treats refugees with traumatic experiences. He is preoccupied with the question of whether trauma can be healed, even though its effects appear to be passed down through the generations.

As part of his work, he applies methods of narrative exposure therapy, a therapeutic approach involving autobiographical storytelling, to resolve trauma. What happens to memories when an experience is so violent that it defies narrative? And how do such experiences become ingrained in individuals, communities and subsequent generations? How can people recognise and break the cycle of suffering and violence? And what possibilities does literary writing open up?