Part III - Contesting Germany’s Social Framework of Memory

Summary

WHEREAS THE NOVELS of Katja Petrowskaja, Vladimir Vertlib, and Barbara Honigmann, which I analyzed in part II, focus on describing the protagonist's country of origin and the ‘alien’ memories the characters have carried with them, the novels of Olga Grjasnowa and Lena Gorelik focus on the protagonist's confrontation with the host country and its specific social framework of memory. By describing the experiences of migration across the mnemonic threshold between East and West, they elaborate how contradictions between two frameworks of memories compel the protagonists to reconsider their opinions of themselves and–especially–of their Jewish identity. The intervention into the host countries’ active and passive forgetting of Eastern European history is undertaken in direct interaction with members of the majority population. Some of these characters are caricatured representations of ‘the German,’ who either (accidentally or explicitly) express anti-Semitic and xenophobic ideas or take an exaggeratedly tolerant and welcoming, philo- Semitic attitude toward the Jewish ‘foreigners,’ excluding them from German society in either case.

In the novels of Petrowskaja, Vertlib, and Honigmann, the narrator's life in the diaspora mainly appears as a frame describing the narrator's temporal position and point of view on the past. Neither the social reality of the host country in which the narrators live nor their experiences of migration are elaborated on more closely. The clash between the mnemonic frameworks is represented by constructing an implicit reader who is ignorant of the experiences of the Eastern European ‘bloodlands,’ ravaged by both Hitler and Stalin, as well as of the Communist regimes with which the migrant coped in the past. The focus of the first category of literature of mnemonic migration is thus on the forgotten or marginalized events that occurred in the Soviet Union and the GDR during and after World War II. In contrast, Grjasnowa and Gorelik represent a type of literature of mnemonic migration that combines recollection of the past in the Soviet Union with an explicit representation of the protagonist's encounter with the new environment and of the opposition between the prevalent mnemonic horizons in the country of origin and the host country respectively.