Disruptions of the Archive: Renegotiating German History in Autobiographical Fiction After 1989

Summary

IN HER AUTOBIOGRAPHICALLY INSPIRED study of family photographs, tellingly entitled Family Secrets (1995), Annette Kuhn describes the family album as “one moment in the cultural construction of family,” further claiming that “it is no coincidence that the conventions of the family album—what goes in and how it is arranged—are, culturally speaking, rather circumscribed.” Kuhn's observation implies an interconnectedness between the construction of family and its visual representation in family photographs. This connection is manifested in the multiple memory layers of the family album, where memories of the album curator and the reader of the album merge. This “archive of the family album,” as Martyn Jolly calls it, plays a crucial role in what Jan and Aleida Assmann have termed the communicative memory of the family, where it functions simultaneously as a record and a source of memory. Further, Kuhn's description hints at the archival structures of the family album, since selection, arrangement, organization, and presentation are crucial elements of albums and archives alike. Hence, the family album can be approached as part of the “vernacular archival activity of ordinary citizens” that Peter Fritzsche describes in his history of the archive in Germany after 1806. Regarding the transformation of photographs into narratives, Marianne Hirsch has argued that “[f]amily pictures depend on … a narrative act of adoption that transforms rectangular pieces of cardboard into telling details.” This highlights how the personalized visual archive of family photographs embodies the intersections of image and text as well as their shared construction of memory, both of which have garnered broad attention within the humanities and beyond.

In this essay, I analyze two post-1989 family stories about life in the GDR that make use of family photographs to question existing memory narratives. Maxim Leo's Haltet Euer Herz bereit (Hold Your Hearts Ready, translated as Red Love, 2009) and Marion Brasch's Ab jetzt ist Ruhe (From Now It's Quiet, 2012) are part of a larger body of prose works whose narratives seek “to reconstruct or revaluate family history and biographical itineraries.”