2 - Matrilineal Narrative and the Feminist Family Romance

Summary

RECENT YEARS HAVE SEEN the publication in Germany of a vast number and array of multigenerational family narratives that look back to the turbulent history of the twentieth century. They look in particular to the family stories that are passed on from one generation to the next as a way of understanding and representing the past, and they also explore those that are kept secret or hidden from view and yet contribute to shaping the present. These narratives use the family as a prism through which to explore the residual impact of the historical events of the twentieth century, and in particular what Anne Fuchs has called the “agitated legacy” of the Second World War, as well as the concerns of contemporary society. The fact that many such family novels have achieved commercial as well as critical success suggests that this genre is one that has secured its place on the German literary scene.

A particular concern with contemporary German family narratives is that they tend to be written from the point of view of the third postwar generation, a generation that has no firsthand experience of the war and is therefore inevitably dependent on the accounts of others for knowledge and understanding. Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall have pointed to the discrepancies that can often emerge between what they term the “Lexikon” of objective, public knowledge about the National Socialist past and the subjective, private “Album” of stories and memories that are passed down through the family; this generation's understanding of past events is often based on secondhand knowledge gleaned from a number of different and often contradictory sources.

The difficulties involved in piecing together the fragments of the family narrative, as well as the broader historical narrative, are often thematized in these texts themselves. Friederike Eigler points to the prevalence in contemporary German literature of generational novels, which she defines as “Romane, in denen Familiengeschichte erforscht oder mühsam rekonstruiert wird” (novels in which family history is examined or carefully reconstructed).These generational novels do not confine themselves to merely telling the stories of various generations of a family but rather emphasize the constructive element that is an inevitable part of the process of reconstruction.