Premium
From ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm
Author(s) -
Fuchs Anne
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/j.0016-8777.2006.00343.x
Subject(s) - drama , german , narrative , identity (music) , the holocaust , normative , repetition (rhetorical device) , literature , narratology , psychoanalytic theory , psychoanalysis , aesthetics , history , sociology , art , psychology , philosophy , epistemology , linguistics , theology
Against the backdrop of the proliferation of trauma theory in public and academic debates, the paper argues that in spite of a recent trend to question the canonised discourse of contrition, German discussions about the legacy of the Nazi past are still largely dominated by the following two paradigms: a first psychoanalytic narrative tells a drama of repression, acting out and repetition compulsion, and a second narrative then restores the Enlightenment paradigm through its story of critical engagement with the past. In order to avoid the pitfall of an unhelpful demonisation of forgetting on the one hand, and the danger of a displaced sacralisation of the Holocaust on the other, the paper introduces the notion of memory contests into the debate. Provisionally defined as retrospective imaginings that simultaneously articulate, question and investigate the normative self‐image of previous generations, this notion accounts for the intergenerational dynamic of recent German identity debates. The dynamic of post‐‘Wende’ memory contests is explored with reference to recent works by Grass, Maron and Timm.