Negotiating Proximity and Distance to Holocaust Memory through Narrativity and Photography in Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe (Pavel’s Letters) (1999)

Abstract

Germany’s unification in 1989 triggered a public and literary confrontation with WWII, the Holocaust and the East-West German past. The years following the “Wende” of 1989/90 witnessed an increase in autobiographical family novels that explore how historical events of the twentieth century impacted upon individual and family pasts and continue to do so. Monika Maron, in claiming Pawels Briefe (Pavel’s Letters) (1999) as a family story/history, rather than novel, raises questions about the ethics of intertwinement between autobiographical memory and family memory, specifically postmemory. By analyzing narrative and photographic engagement, I argue that Maron resists over-identification by engendering critical distance between family memory and autobiographical memory that are both situated in a particular moment of German national memory.

Keywords

• memory
• postmemory
• unification
• post-1989
• GDR memory
• Holocaust memory
• family novels
• generation
• autobiography