4 - Fictionalizations: Holocaust Memory and the Generational Construct in the Works of Contemporary Women Writers

Summary

THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY witnessed a resurgence of literary texts about topics pertaining to the German past. While German literature of the first post-Wall decade focused significantly on the present, responding to the transformations triggered by the twin processes of unification and globalization, even a cursory glance at publications since 2000 confirms that the question is not whether German history and its memory continue to be reflected in contemporary German literature, but how. This renewed focus on history applies to authors of all generations. However, the age-cohort of writers whose parents experienced the Nazi period and the immediate postwar era as children has assumed an important presence among those who continue to reflect on German history in literary form. For writers born in the 1930s and 1940s, their biographical relation to the events of the Nazi period and the Holocaust had a significant influence on their narrative as well as their political perspectives. Younger authors, of course, are no longer bound by such factors, and, moreover, the need to draw generational distinctions has become noticeably less pressing among this age group. The absence of personal memories and the coming-of-age at a time when the legacy of the Nazi period was publicly acknowledged rather than contested have diminished the importance of the generational divide as a defining feature. Yet the frequency with which younger writers, among them many women, turn to the topic underscores their need to develop plots and aesthetic perspectives beyond the ones proposed by the generation of those who insisted on the centrality of Holocaust memory for German culture. Products of the post-feminist age, these recent narratives pursue more flexible gender politics as well and thus offer corrections of sorts to a literary genre closely associated with male writers and notions of masculinity.

The present essay focuses on recent works (published between 2005 and 2008) by four women writers born between 1967 and 1970. Katharina Hacker and Inka Parei were born in Frankfurt am Main, Jenny Erpenbeck and Julia Franck in East Berlin. All four texts address the Nazi period and its memory, featuring male as well as female main protagonists. Most of the characters are German, a few are Jewish, and several are of mixed parentage.