On Researching Fictions

What do you do when you learn that the version of history passed down in your family might not be entirely true and the foundation that held up the grand deeds of your childhood hero abruptly crumbles? How does one disentangle half-truths and relate them to the historical record? These questions form the framework of Matthias Rudolf’s book project — "based on a true story" — whose protagonist sets out to make sense of his dying grandfather’s cryptic last words: “Der Kaiser hat uns verraten” (“The Emperor has betrayed us”). The phrase casts a spell of doubt on the grandfather’s legacy of WWII heroics as a spy and his escape from the Nazis during the German invasion of the Balkan Peninsula in April 1941. Drawing on his research, Professor Rudolf will discuss the challenges of researching memories, making sense of sources in and across geographically dispersed and linguistically diverse archives, and of (not) getting lost in translation.

Matthias Rudolf graduated from the University of Basel, Switzerland and received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published on romantic poetry, biopolitics, and postcolonial theory and taught at the Université de Fribourg, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of Oklahoma. Currently he is a visiting professor in the English Department at Salem State.

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