UC Santa Cruz

How can a sense of “belonging” in the “familiar” care for and include the “foreign” as the “foreign” desires? The photobooks of Seiichi Furuya (b. 1950, Japan, living and working in East/West Germany or Austria since 1973) let me pursue this question. He caught postwar traces in the daily life of Cold War Europe before coming to remix these images to process the suicide of his wife, Christine Furuya-Gössler (b. 1953, Austria, d. 1985, East Germany), a method through which I derive an “ethics of belonging” through a “multinarrative ethics of postwar responsibility.” I articulate narratives from spurs to memory of – or sensory or symbolic association with – World War II or the Asia Pacific War, through visual and textual elements extending from Furuya’s work. It is a mode of rendering emotions “safe” toward others through caution for feelings of “belonging” with those “like oneself.” As my interviews with Furuya indicate, however, he espouses an “ethics of silence.” I examine this ethics through his circles in Japan and Austria along with thinkers who echo them – notably the later Jun Tosaka and Walter Benjamin – in favoring unconsciousness in perceptive encounter. Theoretically, they sought to avoid any registration of difference and thus all potential inequities. Complementarily, then, I reclaim conscious contemplation to ameliorate specific inequities, particularly through “multinarrative” echoes in critical re-readings of Japanese and German war memories by historians Lisa Yoneyama, Yoshikuni Igarashi and Eric Santner. I demonstrate this reclamation through analyses of Furuya’s re-uses of different photographic series across photobooks over time. Findings include narratives of both Japanese national victim mentality and interpersonal tensions with “Japaneseness” through Furuya’s Amsterdam street photography (1981-2004); interventions against anti-Semitism and assimilative cosmopolitanism through Furuya’s images of Dresden and relevant texts (1963-2019); and – through Furuya’s series on Austria’s Eastern Bloc borders (1985-2014) and related work on refugees (1993, 2017) – an update of ethical approaches across multinarrativity and silence.