3 - Beyond the Victims Debate: Flight and Expulsion in Recent Novels by Authors from the Second and Third Generation (Christoph Hein, Reinhard Jirgl, Kathrin Schmidt, and Tanja Dückers)

Summary

THE POST-UNIFICATION PERIOD HAS WITNESSED a renewed interest in twentieth-century German and European history, an interest that is no longer shaped by the ideological struggles of the Cold War yet is still fraught with conflict. This memory boom, as some have termed it, is marked by a generational shift away from the first generation of witnesses, perpetrators, and victims and toward the second and third generations, the last of whom are removed from any immediate exposure to the Second World War and its aftermath. The controversial attention to Germans as victims in public and literary discourses is part of this preoccupation with twentieth-century German and European history. It is within this larger political and cultural context of the 1990s and beyond that new literary representations of German expellees as well as new critical approaches to these representations have emerged.

Following a brief discussion on the state of literary and cultural studies regarding the concept of “generation” on the one hand and representations of expulsion on the other, I look at four recent multigenerational novels that address the expulsion of Germans from Eastern territories at the end of the Second World War: Kathrin Schmidt's Gunnar-Lennefsen- Expedition (1998), Tanja Dückers's Himmelskörper (2003; Heavenly Bodies), Christoph Hein's Landnahme (2004; Settlement, 2008), and Reinhard Jirgl's Die Unvollendeten (2003; The Incomplete). The genre of multigenerational novels invites the examination of shifting approaches to these historical events — as well as to related notions of Heimat and Germanness — across several generations. Schmidt's Gunnar-Lennefsen-Expedition and Dückers's Himmelskörper reconstruct family history from the perspective of the third generation and as such coincide with the generational positions of the authors (Schmidt was born in 1958 in East Germany, and Dückers in 1968 in West Germany). Hein's Landnahme and Jirgl's Die Unvollendeten narrate the experiences of expulsion and relocation from a variety of perspectives, some of which correspond with the authors’ own generational position. (Jirgl, born in 1953, is only a few years older than Schmidt; yet in terms of his literary approach to the issues at hand he has more in common with Christoph Hein, who, born in 1944, toward the end of the war represents the second generation.)