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Yvonne Hergane‘s first novel The Chameleon Ladies can be discussed from several perspectives. On the one hand, it can be read as a generational novel, on the other hand, it can also be read as a women‘s novel in the sense of portraying the history of emancipation of four generations of women. The novel can also be seen as a historical novel, because it covers a historical period of over 120 years and describes the living conditions of four generations of women, three of them living first in Romania and then in Germany, which are also historically conditioned. The novel could therefore also be seen as part of migration literature. This article will explore this complexity of this structure.
The German-speaking Saxon minority from Transylvania, a region in Romania, has almost disappeared due to the historical events after World War II and the fall of communism in December 1989. Therefore, the literary work that was created before 1990 is often considered to be a “lieu de mémoire”, a place of remembrance, for the Saxon culture. This article deals with the question whether Maria Haydl’s short stories can be considered as such or do they show too much influence of the politically imposed writing style in order to be authentic.
The nine stories of Kehlmann’s novel Ruhm. Ein Roman in neun Geschichten (2009) are contentwise independent, yet they are manifoldly linked up by several apparently coincidental elements. Modern means of communication as mobile phones or access to internet, initially invented to bring people together, have now the function to engulf people in misery and isolate them from each other. An analysis on Kehlmann’s social criticism of modern way of life and communication in his literary work is not so easy because of a special character of the novel: it is the fictional writer who ironically questions literature itself and its ethical function.
Margarethe Sindel-Alberti is a rather unknown 20th century writer from Transilvania. Being a member of the German minority it is very unusual for her to write a story about Romanian protagonists. Also unusual is the fact that she writes about a kind of secret initiation of a young girl who is guided by her grandmother how to deal with sexuality. Our analysis makes a referance to the psychoanalytic interpretation of the tale “Little Red Hood” as we find it in the works of Siegmund Freud and to the interpretation as an initiation tale as it is considered by Vladimir Propp. Margarethe Sindel is considered to be outstanding for her geographical space and time writing about a feminist subject and a different culture than her own.
Das Märchen Savia aus dem Band Das verlorene Land der Roma-Schriftstellerin Luminiţa Cioabă stellt den Versuch dar, den bei vielen Roma-Gemeinschaften eingetretenen Identitätsverlust durch Integration in die Lebenswelt des rumänischen Umfeldes auf dichterische Weise zu erklären. Die Untersuchung dieser Problematik im Rahmen einer literaturwissenschaftlichen Tagung beruht auf dem Verständnis, dass Literaturwissenschaft gleichermaßen auch kulturwissenschaftliche Aspekte untersucht.
Sibylle Berg develops in her novel Der Mann schläft a new, nihilistic definition of love. Nietzsche considers that modern mankind killed the god in itself, Dürrenmatt shows the absolute hopelessness of the postmodern society and Berg presents the end of all known forms of love. For her protagonist it is enough to have found someone who needs her as much as she needs him to feel save and complete. But “the man” disappears during a journey to Asia while going to buy some papers. After waiting for three month for him to return she decides to stay there for the rest of her miserable life. The novel has an interesting structure, the story is told in dozens of short scenes, not in a chronological order but reffering to the period with “the man” and without him that confers to it a certain dramatic touch.
The German writer Gabriele Wohmann, who passed away in June 2015 at the age of 83 wrote over 100 books (novels, short stories) essays, poems, more than 20 filmskripts being translated into 15 languages. She ist known for her sharp, ruthless view on German everyday-life and its neurotic, lonely, frustrated protagonists, especially women. But it is not a distant and unaffectedportrayal, but one out of profound sympathy. The literary critic Reinhard Baumgart, even invented the term „Wohmannisieren“. He was referring to the seemingly unspectacular flowing ofher stories, but „under the surface it rages, however“. We then refer to a short story (Flitterwoche. Dritter Tag– Honeymoon. Third day) from her latest book Eine souveräne Frau. The main theme of this narrative, as well as in numerous other texts by Wohmann, is the familial relationship disorders in everyday middle-class existences. The main problem is the inability of the protagonists to communicate in a familiar and natural waywith each other, as one might expect of newlyweds.
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The title Grenzfall of this crime novel is based on a pun because it means in German both “borderline case” and “border incident”. The novel refers to an incident at the border between Poland and Germany, that really happened in 1992, when two Roma from Romania were shot in strange circumstances. Kröger continues in her fiction the film script that she had written for the documentary Revision, produced in 2012, 10 years after the incident. The crime novel tries to reveal the causes that led to the violent death of the two, to disclose why German police investigations were so superficial, to present what effects all this had on the families of the two dead men, and what regional and ethnic stereotypes dominate the thinking of those involved in the action.
Erwin Neustädter was a novellist and poet of the German minority in Romania, who published two novels and some poems in the period between the two World Wars. After WW II he has been inprisoned several times. I want to present in my text his report about the time in prison between 1961 and 1963. The typoscript of about 200 pages has been found after his and his wife’s death in 1995 and has been published by the family in 2015. I want to present this book to a larger audience, because it is an authentic report on the situation during the 1950s and 1960s in communist Romania, which doesn’t focus on the political aspects of detention but on the psychological ones.