On the emotions of autobiography

Writing about experiences centered around specific pivotal moments in my life is not easy for me. I easily get wrapped up in my own emotions. I find that autobiography does not come naturally to me. I think some of the closest autobiographical-style writing I have done was included in Episode 6 when I talked about my own immigrant story.I would like to explore this idea of autobiography with some help from my former professor, Dr. Erwin Warkentin. Erwin, as I call him these days, has been one of my dearest mentors and friends throughout the past thirty years of my life. I am proud to have been one of his first German students at Memorial University when I was a wet-behind-the-ears, snot-faced undergraduate student. He continues to impart some modicum of wisdom and put up with my questions when I call.Erwin was my professor of German, but at various times, he has also been the head of the Memorial German and Russian Department and the creator of the communications program at the University, among many other titles and professions.I will read a piece that he wrote–please listen to the episode–about his first and last memories of his mother, after which he and I will have a conversation about how he feels about me reading this piece online and much, much more.Thanks for reading and listening. Erwin and I will cover many more topics in select episodes, so please subscribe if you enjoy this!The Conversation. Please note, this transcript has been edited so it can be read easier online. DupsYou just heard me tell a story that was written by Dr. Warkentin. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, Dr. Warkentin has been one of my professors and mentors throughout my life, ever since I was about 18 years old till I am whatever I am today.Last year, when I was visiting Dr. Warkentin in Berlin, he and I were having lots of discussions about writing as I was sitting down to start writing myself. As we were talking about writing, he pulled out a book that his daughter had asked him to prepare for his grandchildren.These were stories of his life.Later, we discussed a lot about what these stories might mean to him and to his family down the road. So first, I would like to introduce you to Dr. Warkentin.Hello, Dr. Warkentin, or Erwin, as I now call you.ErwinYeah, hi.DupsHow are you doing?ErwinGood.I still call you Duleepa, not Dups.DupsOh, well, only my mother calls me that, which is an appropriate segue to what I just read. So this is a very personal piece that you wrote about your mother.ErwinAbsolutely. It’s one of these pieces where I have difficulty controlling my emotions because there are a lot of emotions connected to it. And it’s so different from the other writing that I get to do. It’s just, it’s an interesting exercise, especially if someone reads it to me as you just did. It’s an odd sort of experience. It’s almost out of body.DupsHow is it different? Is it because I put the intonations and the inflections in the different places that you would have seen?ErwinYes, absolutely. There were certain passages, the passage where you named these place names.Dups“Eaton’s, Lyceum, Kresge’s, Met Store, Arthur Murray’s, the Hudson’s Bay.”ErwinExactly. You actually imparted some speed. You made it sound as though the vehicle was going faster. You made it sound interesting for me it was terribly uninteresting these were just places along the way and yes they’re important to me but the way you read it all of a sudden it kind of opened my eyes. Oh yeah okay the these are maybe important things to talk about in terms of making the mundane interesting. I don’t know if that’s how it works but perhaps…DupsSo when I was reading it, I get the emotion and the feeling of that last time you saw your mother and the first time. Those are clear to me. But obviously, I have no connection to your mother. And I only have a connection to you. So I’m imagining the child, Erwin, and the adult Erwin giving the story. How do you feel when you hear my words?ErwinI’m a little bit distant from it when I hear it coming from you because when I read this story to myself you know it clearly. Sometimes you read it out loud but most of the time it’s simply quiet reading to yourself as you’re looking at the text. When I read this to myself I see my mother, I’m just an observer in the story as it were.However, when you read it to me, all of a sudden I have this out-of-body experience where I’m looking at myself. I’m looking at this little boy that I did not really seem that aware of. You know, the little boy was a narrator, if anything.In some ways I thought, well, maybe completely unimportant because I was focused on my mother. By having you read this to me in this way and give these different interpretations of the text, in the way you read it, all of a sudden I’m focusing on the little boy, on myself.And so that I find incredibly interesting.DupsI think one of the really interesting things for me is when I write something autobiographical, I do get lost in the emotion of my memory. Now that you’re just imagining the child and seeing it through my reading, do you have that same feeling of the emotion or is it different?ErwinNo, the emotion is still there.It may actually be more profound because when I’m reading it to myself, I have control over the text, as it were, and I know absolutely what’s coming in the text. However, when you read it, the fact that you’ll put a different intonation on a different word or emphasize something that kind of alienates the piece from me. That is, it creates this distance that doesn’t normally exist. The emotion may actually be even more intense in that I don’t have absolute control over what’s being read, in particular in how it’s being read.DupsWell, yeah, exactly. You know the words, you know where the story is going, but it’s the, how am I going to say the words that are coming up.So how does this feel now that you’ve written this? And of course, this is going into that book that you’re going to give your grandchildren. So what does this mean to you? To have them read it, knowing that, they might be much older when they read it?ErwinThe interesting thing is that I experience them now as a five-year-old and a three-year-old. They’re actually about the age that I was in this story (at least) the older one–the five-year-old, the three-year-old, he’ll get there too.For me to know that they will read this, the important thing is that they’ll know something about the essence of their grandfather beyond me being playful with them, me bringing them toys or gifts or things like that, me allowing them to get away with stuff that I would have never allowed my son to get away with.It will hopefully give them a broader view of who their grandfather is and was. So in other words, I’m passing something on to another generation so that they can perhaps understand me. Now, there’s another aspect to this, and that is perhaps I’m creating my own defense.DupsDefense in what way?ErwinThey may hear certain things about their grandfather that aren’t particularly positive. I’m not saying nasty things or anything like that. But, my son may remember certain events in certain ways, and he may inadvertently have dropped them at some point on them. In this way, I can kind of defend myself before the fact.DupsThat’s a good point. It’s very interesting because I guess in some ways. When you have children and the human race continues on generation through generation, we pass on our genes. What we hope to do is to teach the children. We stuff them with all sorts of stuff, whether it’s ethics, values, or German history. Then we send them out into the world, they collect all sorts of other experiences, and they become fully formed individuals.I guess in some ways, this, what you’re doing is kind of affecting that what is carried on to the next generation. It’s almost like a genome in some ways, except you get to control it, you get to control exactly what happens there.ErwinExactly. It’s a genome that I’m passing on, but one that I have gone in and manufactured or I’ve altered in some way. It should be known that I also include unflattering things in my stories about myself. Not just the positive. I want them to get the idea that there’s more to their grandfather than just kind of this statue or idol that’s been created. Rather, he was a fully formed human being with all the foibles.Hopefully they can then also learn something from the negative aspects of who their grandfather was and some of the things that he may have done. Not all of them were positive. Some of them were laughable. Others, well, they were perhaps a little more serious.DupsWell, isn’t that what they call a human life? That is the human experience.ErwinExactly. And I’m hoping to pass that on.DupsSo going back to the story, one of the interesting things for me reading it, of course, is that I know you as my professor, and as a friend. And this is a very personal piece, right? It’s not as if when you were teaching me about the letters of Werther or Goethe, we were talking about your mother or your past.What’s really interesting to me is that this gives me an insight that I didn’t have on you, which if I were to read someone’s autobiography of a movie star or something like it doesn’t really affect me. But this I can actually talk to you about it.One of the interesting things I find is what you do put in and what you don’t put in. What didn’t you put in here? Because there’s a lot here that I can actually pick out and talk about, for example: “she has a glowing smile and waves goodbye as the elevator doors closed.” But you don’t talk about what she was wearing. You don’t think about any of her pain or anything else that might be happening. You’re thinking about the positive things.ErwinAnd for me at that time, that was important because we all knew that she was going to die. She knew that she would die and that it would not take very long for her to pass on. My two sisters are both nurses. Both of them have worked, and one of them still does work on a palliative care unit. We’d already been through the drill once with my father, so we knew what was going to happen. So we thought it would be kind of useless to focus on the negative thing.Yeah, there’s negative things that are associated with memories of my mother. And yes, we are selective in the memories that we pass on. You have to remember that the last bit of my career I spent talking about and writing about propaganda. Essentially, this also works like a propaganda piece of sorts. If you were to look at it through the lens of a propaganda expert, they’d be able to pick this apart and say, this is what he’s doing.He’s emphasizing this, he’s downplaying that. That incident when he was 16 years old and his mother really got ticked off at him; or, the first time she caught him swearing: all of that is gone. It’s not there.Because when it comes to saying goodbye to someone for the life, that stuff is unimportant. It’s the positive stuff that, in my view at least, is important when you’re talking about a personal relationship with someone that is that close to you.In particular, the location for me, that was the thing that struck me. I remember when I left the hospital, I drove to my sister’s and she was actually, she was a nurse on that particular ward. She kind of kept mother close, as it were. She says, “you do know that used to be the maternity ward?” All these conversations over the years clicked together that, yes, I was saying goodbye to her in the same place I said hello. It’s one of these things that is a profoundly emotional thing that we try to articulate in some sort of way.I think this is my attempt to being someone who is also emotionally articulate. I don’t know if that’s a thing or not, to be emotionally articulate And as we get older, it becomes more and more important, I think. I’m sure that you’re going to start experiencing some of that, too, as you get older. You’re still that young man that I met in the second class that I ever taught at Memorial. I say the second class because there was someone missing the first class.Dups(Laughs). Fair enough. I think what I find quite fascinating is that we spend a lot of time thinking about the mundane in the people we remember when I read through this, it’s really interesting to me, this is not just you, as I realize I do it as well. I think about the mundane.I think about my dad and how he would always have to have his pen in the right place. I don’t think about the extraordinary thing he did or whatever the case may be. So when I remember people, I remember the mundane.Why do you think that is?ErwinThose are the personal moments. Those are the moments we don’t share with anyone else. If you think about that event with my mother and what kind of surrounds it is, going to Woolworths, having lunch with her. This was just the two of us. Yeah, there were other people around. Yes, my father knew that she was going to go out that morning and afternoon, but it was just the two of us that experienced that.So for me, it’s one of these things I can hold on to and say, this is mine.This is all mine.You know, nobody else can have that. And it’s those mundane moments that give that to us. You talked about your father having the pen in just the right place. Well, has anyone else noticed that? It’s a very special thing that you noticed about your father and something that kind of binds the two of you together.I think we have that with any number of different people. Those are the things that make these people precious to us because we get an insight int their very private sphere, which they don’t allow too terribly many other people to have access to.DupsYou have spent your life writing. You have spent the last 30 years putting together books, papers, lectures. They’re very different, though. We are taught never to write with “I” when we’re doing academic papers.How does it feel to use “I”?How does it feel to put yourself down on paper and actually have an opinion?ErwinIt feels good. It really does.I don’t think I realized how much I resented that practice of never using “I” in a paper unless someone else was using the word “I” and I had to record that, in a document somewhere.it’s important to be able to tell people, this is what I think, not, this is what the evidence points towards and blah, blah, blah, on and on it goes. Rather saying, here’s something we’re not too sure about, why we think this way, but this is the way I think.Another one of these words that is banished from academic writing: “This is how I feel.” When I’m writing about Wolfgang Borchert or Goethe or Schiller or one of these guys, I can never say “I feel this way” in an academic piece. I can certainly talk to individuals that may have seen a play together with me, and we can talk about how it made us feel and things like that. But in an academic world, you don’t talk about how you feel about a piece.That may be changing to some degree, but there’s still a lot of this, “oh, no, we don’t want to talk about feelings.” We only want to talk about provable concepts that can be proven through logical means.DupsIsn’t there a world where you have both? You can have the proven logic but still have the writer’s feeling? Because if you don’t know the writer’s feeling, the biases creep in just by the things you don’t say, the words you use. This is what I’ve always felt about writing and bias and issues.ErwinIt all depends on whether Plato or Aristotle is on top at any particular time in your mind. If you kind of go along with Plato, feelings can figure into things, If you’re a strict Aristotelian, well, feelings have to kind of be left to the side. They’re not that significant. They’re not that important.It all depends. And it is a struggle.Now, don’t get me wrong. Yes, emotions are part of even academic writing. I was told by my supervisor, Dr. Holger Pausch at the University of Alberta, he said “you’re far more interesting when you’re engaged; when you’re pissed off about something.” And that’s the way he wanted me to write.He did say within reason.There’s that word again, reason.But there can be and there should be a place for both. I think perhaps we’ve kind of gone there and we’ve passed that point. If you look at things transpiring in the world today, for example, and if you listen to any of the commentators it has very little to do with logic and has a lot to do with how they feel about something.So maybe we’ve gone too far in certain ways.DupsWhat’s funny is, and the reason why I brought it up is, because 30 years ago, you and I sat in the university quadrangle outside the arts building, and we were talking about Werther. I was, of course, writing at The Muse, and we were talking about journalism, about authenticity and non-bias in journalism. You actually did use the expression, if I remember correctly, you need to be engaged if you’re going to be listening and writing.ErwinSo there you can see how this gets passed on from one to the other. I was told that by my supervisor, and I’m sorry, it’s not exclusive to you, I’ve tried to pass that on to others.You have to be engaged.Otherwise, why bother?DupsWell, I have to say that I was engaged reading the story out and watching your face as I read it out, 0which was entertaining in and of itself.Thank you so much, Dr. Warkentin.Now, before we, we say goodbye, we are going to do more episodes together because we have a whole set, right?ErwinYep. I’m looking forward to it.DupsIt’s going to be a lot of fun. There’s going to be a time at least when you’re going to read one of my stories out, so it’s going to be entertaining for me to hear.ErwinThen I don’t get to be so much the sidekick. The funny thing in all of this is that we’ve kind of come full circle in many ways. It’s me now submitting something to you to have it read and me sitting there wondering, does he like it? Is it any good?DupsWell, I haven’t given you your mark back.ErwinI know, I know, and I’m waiting.DupsAnd maybe you’ll find out next week when I give you your mark. So again, thank you very much, Dr. Warkentin. It’s been a pleasure as always.ErwinYou’re more than welcome.If you enjoyed this podcast, please help it reach a wider audience!About my guest, Dr. Erwin J. WarkentinErwin J. Warkentin received his PhD in German language and literature from the University of Alberta in 1995, having written his dissertation on the author of Draussen vor der Tür [The Man Outside] by Wolfgang Borchert. His previous publications include The History of US Information Control in Post-War Germany, the Past Imperfect (2016), and the two volume The Political Warfare Executive, Words at War (2021). He has written extensively on post-war German literature and culture with his book, Unpublishable Works, being the first English language biography of Borchert which has helped spark a renewal of interest in this important author and playwright. Since arriving at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, where he was an associate professor of both German and Communications Studies, he has served in various leadership positions, with the most recent being the Interim Head of Sociology. Over the years, he has broadened his scholarly interests to include propaganda and persuasion in addition to teaching and conducting research in German literature. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tales.dups.ca