The Ruins of Europe

Milo Rau’s Europe Trilogy and the (Re)Mediation of the Real*

Authors

  • Susanne C. Knittel Utrecht University

Abstract

This paper takes Milo Rau’s Europe Trilogy as a prism through which to examine the potential of theater as a medium not only for political and social critique, but also for presenting an alternative European imaginary and community of memory. The Civil Wars (2014), The Dark Ages (2015), and Empire (2016) explore the foundations of European memory and identity against the backdrop of war and genocide, religious fundamentalism, exile and displacement. Structured around the points of intersection between the actors’ own lives and key events in recent European history, the trilogy troubles the distinction between reality and artifice, representation and reportage, and deconstructs the single narrative of European memory by multiplying voices and stories, emphasizing the transcultural interconnectedness of present-day Europeans.

Author Biography

  • Susanne C. Knittel, Utrecht University

    Susanne C. Knittel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on questions of memory, commemoration, and cultural amnesia across cultures and media. She is the author of The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (Fordham UP, 2015), a comparative analysis of German and Italian memory culture, which brings memory studies, disability studies, and postcolonial studies together. Her current research project, Faces of Evil: The Figure of the Perpetrator in Contemporary Memory Culture, is supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). It traces the figure of the perpetrator through post-1989 memory culture in Germany and Romania, where the joint legacies of Fascism and Communism render questions of perpetration and victimhood inherently ambiguous and complex.

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Published

2026-05-04

Issue

Vol. 29 No. 1 (2016): The State of Europe

Section

Main Section

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Knittel, S. C. (2026). The Ruins of Europe: Milo Rau’s Europe Trilogy and the (Re)Mediation of the Real*. FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies, 29(1), 41-59. https://platform.openjournals.nl/FRAME/article/view/27374