Eingrenzung durch Sprache und Identität bei Michael Zeller in "Die Reise nach Samosch" und bei Stephan Wackwitz in "Ein unsichtbares Land"

Abstract

Michael Zeller and Stephan Wackwitz belong to the generation of grandchildren who search traces of their own family history. In the novel "Die Reise nach Samosch" by Michael Zeller a young writer Sebastian tries to reconstruct his family history for his grandmother, who comes from Opole (Oppeln in German). She experienced traumatizing stories during the war and after it. Her grandson, a young writer, finds out while working on the family chronicle that his biological grandfather was not a German but a Pole when working on the family chronicle. Stephan Wackwitz, in turn, deals with a diary of his grandfather who worked in southeast Africa and Upper Silesia – these lands belonged to Germany before. He fought in the First World War as an zealous nationalist. The author’s father spent the Second World War in the American captivity. The author tries to explore his grandfather’s and father’s motivation for their attitudes in their lives. I would like to examine and reveal the strategies used by both authors, as presented in the process of their ancestors’ coping with the culture of remembering. The aim of the paper is to provide evidence for the extent to which spatial constellations in the novels by Zeller and Wackwitz are to be viewed as significant memory carriers. I consider family novels of the generations of grandsons a meaningful platform for presenting very problematic historical processes (national socialism, communism) in 1930s and 1940s in central Europe.

Keywords

• family history
• identity
• the First and Second World War
• generation of grandsons
• culture of remembering