Intertext als Gedenken. Herta Müllers Roman «Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger» in Konstellation mit Texten von Günter Grass

Abstract

This article traces intertextual references in Herta Müller’s 1992 novel Even back then, the Fox was the Hunter with Günter Grass’s texts as a dialogical form of remembrance. In conjunction with an excerpt from Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion, selected passages are examined to show how these texts articulate in exemplary manner a remembrance of experiences of dictatorship, war, and National Socialism. Herta Müller’s and Günter Grass’s texts discuss contemporary historical “collective events” in a special literary conjunction of fiction and memory distinguished from the historical discourse which invokes reality.