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Using the example of the village novel Three Kilometers from the final phase of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, the article follows the discovery of memory, examining the image of the Banat village community, which is dominated by hopelessness, fear and thoughts of flight. The emptiness and the cold motif used at the end point to the dissolution of the Swabian village world. The Banat village is presented at the interface between real life reality and a landscape of memories.
It is well known that the media has strongly shaped the life of the people in many respects and that it exerts a sustained influence on our value systems and ways of thinking. Thus it also shows a clear extension of the human life. By far less famously however is the fact that nowadays media is the basis for all forms of mental development. This is why the relation between the people and the media is extremely tightened. Nevertheless, this ambivalent relation offers multi-complex material for the literary inspiration. Addressing the topic of the media in the literature combines two aspects ritically: On the one hand it reflects the human behaviour compared with the media and, on the other hand, it underlines emphatically the intermedial writing itself. My speech will be dedicated to the question: how these both aspects interact with each other. The narrative text of Alfred Andersch’s Erinnerte Gestalten will serve the answers to my topic. In this three prosaic texts Andersch shows the subject of the intermedial writing from different perspectives and he discusses certain human reactions to the media.
Uwe Timm and Robert Schiff have both written an autobiographical text dealing with the premature death of an elder brother who was a combattant in the Waffen-SS in their childhood. Despite the frappantly similar biographical constellation, there are differences in narrative technique and thematical focus that stem from their respective sociocultural context. The analysis shows that Timm is in many ways a representative author of the German ‘68 generation that critically reevaluates the attitude of their parents during the national socialist period and points to omissions and falsifications in the oral family history, while the narration of Schiff, an emigrated author born in the pre-war milieu of the German minority of Southwest Romania, is mainly a reconstruction of the impact of big history on his childhood and thus also the effort to conserve the memory of a world that has passed away and to reconcile himself with the experience of loss.
My paper will explore the interrelation between past, present and identity, as well as the dynamics of social change in contemporary German and Romanian literature, as exemplified by Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder (2002) and Ioana Bradea’s Scotch (2010). Both authors belong to a new generation of writers who, having experienced the collapse of the communist regime as adolescents, investigate the traumatic experience of change and adjustment to the social, economic and cultural realities of post-communist societies. While Hensel aims at recreating the lost Heimat (motherland) as an Erinnerungsraum (space of remembrance) and portraying the social tensions of the post-unification decade from an Eastern German perspective, Bradea focuses on depicting the desolate post-communist industrial landscape, as well as the everyday lives of anonymous Romanians caught in the vagaries of transition.