4 - Prose Narrative: Archive Work and Its Discontents

Summary

REFLECTING THE post-Wende “memory boom” that has shaped German culture since 1990, German literature in the Berlin Republic has focused on the memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust in ways that show the complexity and continued relevance of this legacy. Literary texts narrate and perform memory work, which is often triggered by an encounter with archive material, be this an official document or a family photograph. It is almost a cliché of this genre that the discovery of a longhidden artefact initiates a belated process of remembering. Beyond the use of archive material as a narrative device, however, recent literary texts show how subsequent generations depend increasingly on the archive to engage with the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Marianne Hirsch's concept of “postmemory” has become a crucial paradigm for understanding the particular preoccupation of recent German literature with material artefacts in its broader focus on this period of history. Hirsch developed her concept to describe how the second generation relates to the traumatic pasts of their parents; however, postmemory is applied increasingly to the engagement of subsequent generations and to those without family connection to the victims. Indeed, postmemory as a means of connecting with a past not experienced directly is pivotal in responding to what Jennifer Kapczynski and Erin McGlothlin describe as “the enduring post-Holocaust condition of contemporary German culture.” According to Hirsch, postmemory turns on “leftovers, debris, single items,” which are to be “collected and assembled” in order to generate narratives about a past previously unarticulated. Thus, it relies on archive material. The archival turn that I am arguing for here can be understood in part as the pivotal gesture of postmemory. As mentioned in the introduction, Hirsch has even gone on to identify postmemory's own “archival turn,” arguing that the “aesthetic and ethical practices of postmemory” are characterized by an “archival impulse.” Yet postmemory also stands in a certain opposition to the archive: Hirsch highlights the role of the family archive in connecting to the past, and the way in which the personal, intimate materials that this encompasses often act as “correctives or additions” to the insufficiencies of the formal archive.