5 - From the Past to the Present and Back: Colonial History and Family History

Summary

As Hugo Aust has pointed out, historical fiction is always concerned with the present as much as with the past it represents. It is the present that shapes its literary images of the past, making the “historicity [Geschichtlichkeit]” of narration in historical novels not so much “a function of the choice of material from the distant past but, quite on the contrary, a result of the narrative's link to the present.” The resonance of “1968” in Timm's Morenga, the fascination with transcultural experience in Trojanow's Der Weltensammler, and the problematic projection back into the colonial past of post-1980s visions of intercultural partnership in Hilliges's Sterne über Afrika are merely particularly striking instances of this fundamental dialectic of time in historical narrative. Some authors, such as Capus in Munzinger Pascha and Buch in Kain und Abel in Afrika, translate this dialectic into the explicit cross-mapping of two narrative strands, set in the colonial past and the postcolonial present respectively. Probably the most popular approach to interlinking past and present in contemporary German literature, however, is the use of family narratives as a means of exploring the intersections of history, private life, and wider social concerns, with references to contemporary Germany's poignant culture of memory. The resurgence of the family novel and its reinvention as the genre of transgenerational memory narratives is a case in point, bringing together in often metafictional style the recollection of defining historical experiences refracted in family history, as seen from a second- or third-generation perspective, and the rewriting of historical understanding from the “grassroots” perspectives of collective memory and individual inquiry.