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Conclusion: “Lived Spaces” in Literary Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2014

Friederike Eigler
Affiliation:
Professor of German at Georgetown University
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Summary

To conclude, I will offer a few final comments on this study's overarching question regarding literary engagements with Heimat in the context of flight and expulsion and in the context of contemporary German-Polish border regions. By selecting narratives from authors of different generations who revisit the human and social effects of forced relocation in the context of the Second World War, I have focused on different literary responses to the loss of Heimat and on narrative efforts to establish new ones. Horst Bienek's tetralogy from the 1970s and early 1980s exemplifies the critical engagement with lost territories by an author of the first generation. Christoph Hein's Landnahme and Reinhard Jirgl's Die Unvollendeten represent novels that work through the “postmemories of loss” that are characteristic of post-Wende literary approaches by the second generation. Kathrin Schmidt's Gunnar-Lennefsen Expedition and Tanja Dückers's Himmelskörper, authors of the third generation, go beyond a fixation on loss and illustrate approaches that construct places of belonging via re-membering and reimagining family history. By contrast, substantive engagement with the postmemorial spaces of specific geographies of German-Polish border regions is the main focus of Olga Tokarczuk's Dom dzienny, dom nocny (Taghaus, Nachthaus) and of Sabrina Janesch's Katzenberge—the last representing the youngest generation of German writers.

Type
Chapter
Information
Heimat, Space, Narrative
Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion
, pp. 177 - 180
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2014

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