“Klutz is an evocative, beautifully written book that touches us in the interstices of being where the past that is not past causes a stumble, beats our hearts, and gestures forth cross-temporal relation….Memoir, fieldnotes, critical theory, and performance philosophy combine in such a way that we touch unutterable loss even as we encounter and learn to pronounce the re-iterability of resilient, still-articulate love” – Rebecca Schneider
When Tom Hastings discovers that his grandmother lived a short walk from Else Lubranczyk, a middle-class Jewish seamstress whose letters are kept in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, he travels to Berlin. Else’s letters to her refugee daughter ,Helga, tell a story of ordinary life in Schöneberg; of recriminations, fantasies of reunion, and thwarted attempts to get out. But where the author’s grandmother fled, Else and her niece, Steffi Levy, were deported to Theresienstadt in 1943.
Visiting the shops, streets, and synagogues mentioned by Else, Hastings searches Berlin for signs of Jewish life of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Along the way, he confronts his own Jewishness against the fraught contemporary scene of German Staatsräson and the crackdown on solidarity. Klutz is about stumbling towards something and not getting there, and finding something else instead. Turning to works by Georges Perec, Kurt Schwitters, Hanna Lévy-Hass, Paul Gilroy, and Rebecca Schneider, Klutz tries, and fails, to reckon with the consequences of the Nazi genocide.
Read Tom’s early reflections on letter writing here.
About Tom Hastings:
Dr Tom Hastings is Lecturer in Dance at The Place, London. Tom works on contemporary performance at the intersection of politics, and theories of race and gender. He has previously taught at Roehampton University, University of East London, and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. His research broadly concerns the social aspects of performance.
Preview a sample of Klutz below:
Product Details:
- Publisher: Holocaust Centre North
- Published: August 2025
- Length: 190 pages
- ISBN: 978-1-0685609-3-4
- Book Design: Theo Inglis
- Printed in the UK by TJ Books