830 Literaturen germanischer Sprachen; Deutsche Literatur
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The present article is based on the premise that Europe is currently in context of migration dynamics between 'home' and 'foreign' ideas, between 'soft' strategies of inclusion, social participation on the one hand, and 'hard' tactics ofexclusion of the 'others' or 'Migrants' on the other hand. Against this background and based on some ideas of Zygmunt Bauman, Navid Kermani and Amin Maalouf, I will firstly discuss some factors of the 'We-debate'. Then, using the example of the novel So tun, als ob es regnet of the German-Romanian author Iris Wolff I will analyze how far literature uses translation and multilingualism to initiate a poetological process of understanding others and therefore counteracts cultural we-phantasms in Europe.
This essay deals with the intertextuality of the 21st century novel Zaira by the Swiss-Romanian writer Cătălin Dorian Florescu and the 21th century tragedy Zaire by Voltaire. It is analysed whether the name of the female protagonist Zaira is used by Florescu by accident or whether he refers to Voltaire. Furthermore, the differences between East and West brought up in the novel and the tragedy are examined. There are some similarities to be found as to the topoi of the selling respectively buying of women or fate deciding about the life of the protagonists. However, in the author’s opinion they don`t justify the assumption that Florescu knows the text by Voltaire or even uses it in his own novel.
: The concept of the foreign view is a recurring theme throughout all of Herta Müller’s prose. This kind of view derives from her biography. Certainly an unique biography but it is also transferable to many other people. Expressions like „remaining in order to leave“ or „arrived, but long not here“ become guidelines of leaving and arrivals or non-arrivals. The individual acts in-between languages, worlds and in-between cultures. Identity has to change continuously, as it is always in a process.
The intercultural novel of Julya Rabinowich The Earth-eater is fed with complex motivs and intertextual allusions, shows the physical and psychological ruin of a migrant, forced by social conditions to sell her body to survive. Closely interwoven are memories of her childhood and her previous, bitter life. Rabinowich gives an insight into the hardened and thoroughly abysmal emotional world of her protagonist, who belongs to those who „get up and go on”, but also into the capitalist value system, which judges man according to his productive power. In the end, the novel leaves the reality plane and echoes into the surreal to signal the complete descent of the figure into madness and death. In order to better illustrate the psychosis caused by uprooting and abandonment, Julya Rabinowich makes bonds in the Jewish literary traditions.