5 - The East-West Division through the Lens of the Divided Germany: Barbara Honigmann

Summary

BARBARA HONIGMANN GREW UP in the former German Democratic Republic as the child of Jewish Communist parents who survived the Holocaust in British exile. Born in 1949, she is one of the oldest representatives of the second generation of German-Jewish authors. Despite the fact she neither hails from outside the German-speaking area nor has moved to Western Germany like the other authors examined in this study, I consider Honigmann's texts as Jewish literature of mnemonic migration. Even though Honigmann left Germany altogether and migrated to Strasbourg, France, she, also in her own view, remains a German author. As a German author with origins in the GDR, her writing contributes to the importing of topics related to socialist Eastern Europe into the German-language book market. As I have argued above, it is not the age of the author but the author's experience of growing up in a country dominated by a Communist mindset that constitutes their ability to articulate the mnemonic borderline between Communist East and capitalist West. Honigmann is widely considered to be a German- Jewish author who deals primarily with Jewish identity, exile, and return to Judaism and only secondarily with the experience of growing up and living in the GDR. My reading does not aim to diminish the importance of her existential search for identity and her consideration of the ethics of exile, but highlights aspects of her writings that have hitherto not been sufficiently explored.

Even for those who did not move to the West, the dissolution of the GDR and the unification caused a transformation of the economic, social, and mnemonic environment that is comparable with the experience of migrating. Indeed, the unification not only liberated the GDR's citizens but also deprived them of their lifeworld. It is thus highly relevant to consider former East German writers as producing a particular category of literature of mnemonic migration that expresses the collision of their memories of Socialism with the West German social and mnemonic context into which they were transferred.

Wolfgang Emmerich has suggested that reunited Germany is a microcosm of the unified Europe, in that the former East and West Germany, like Europe as a whole, are still divided by a mnemonic borderline even after unification.