ABSTRACT
This paper reads Herta Müller's life and works in the light of those of Hannah Arendt in order to explore Müller's place within broad currents of European history, literature, and thought. ...Arendt and Müller are ethical, phenomenological, and instinctively iconoclastic thinkers who insist on the value of experience and are unafraid to think and speak, to use Arendt's term, ‘without a banister’. Both mount a modernist challenge to totalising discourses and seek out the possibilities of humanity in dark times, locating these in ideology's opposites: singularity, newness, and infinite possibility, in short, in the ‘natality’ (Arendt) which characterises the human condition. Müller's protagonists experience the loneliness and atomisation that Arendt identified as central to totalitarian rule, but they are also survivors and witnesses whose stories illuminate across time. Müller's disorienting collage technique, reminiscent of Benjamin's montages of quotations, promotes in the consumer a process of judgement and thought, a ‘vigilant partiality’ (Arendt on G. E. Lessing) which spurs engagement with the issues of their own era.
Zusammenfassung
Dieser Beitrag untersucht Herta Müllers Leben und Werk im Lichte Hannah Arendts, um Müller innerhalb breiter Strömungen der europäischen Geschichte, Literatur und des Denkens zu positionieren. Arendt und Müller sind ethische, phänomenologische und instinktiv ikonoklastische Denker, die auf dem Wert der Erfahrung bestehen und keine Angst haben, ‘ohne Geländer’ (Arendt) zu denken und zu sprechen. Beide fordern auf modernistische Weise totalisierende Diskurse heraus und suchen nach Möglichkeiten der Menschlichheit in dunklen Zeiten, die sie in den Gegensätzen zum ideologischen Denken finden: in der Singularität, Neuheit und den unendlichen Möglichkeiten, kurz gesagt, in der ‘Natalität’ (Arendt), die den menschlichen Zustand kennzeichnet. Müllers Protagonisten erleben die Einsamkeit und Atomisierung, die Arendt als zentrales Element der totalitären Herrschaft bezeichnet hat, aber sie sind auch Überlebende und Zeugen, deren Geschichten über die Zeit hinweg erleuchten. Müllers verwirrende Collagetechnik, die an Benjamins Zitate‐Montagen erinnert, fördert im Leser und Betracher einen Prozess des Urteilens und Denkens, eine ‘wachsame Parteilichkeit’ (Arendt über G. E. Lessing), die zum Engagement in der eigenen Epoche anregen soll.
Is there an Eastern European turn in contemporary German-language literature? The papers in this special issue argue that this is the case. The works examined here are products of the post-Wende ...German-speaking countries and of post-communist Europe. Some, but by no means all, are by writers from former Eastern-bloc countries who learned German as a second language. Some of these works speak of migration to the West, and evaluate the policies and attitudes of the German-speaking countries towards immigrants and their eastern neighbours. Some thematise the relationship between language, or languages, and identities, whether national or transnational. Some examine how places and spaces in the former East are continually reconceptualised as regimes change and memories shift and evolve. Some re-examine, without Ostalgie, a communality of experience in the former Eastern bloc and ask whether the (generally) unforeseen collapse of the communist dictatorships in Europe necessitates an end to all utopian thinking. All also address the present moment and the Europe we now share. (Author abstract)
This paper notes that recent fiction in German by writers from eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia constitutes a new wave of migrant writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It suggests a ...provisional unity to these texts based on the snapshot they provide of late-stage communism and the post-communist transformation of eastern and western Europe, focusing on five common scenarios. Yet the considerable areas of overlap with trends in other German-language literatures indicate that this literature cannot be labelled "marginal". Rather this emerging field is transforming German literatures from within and contributing to a post-Cold War remapping of Europe.
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This research was generously supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council under their Research Leave Scheme.
Taking as its starting point Vladimir Vertlib's noted ability to cross borders and represent otherness in his writing, the article examines this Russian-Austrian-Jewish author's use of narrative form ...in all his work to date. While his deceptively conventional realist narratives achieve provisional closure at the level of plot, they are structured so as to juxtapose voices, times and modes in a way which probes, but does not resolve, a range of contemporary problems. These concern migration (in Abschiebung and Zwischenstationen), memory, remembrance and twentieth-century European history (in Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur), Jewish identities and the negative German-Jewish symbiosis (in Letzter Wunsch), and the remembrance of the Third Reich in central Europe (in Mein erster Mörder and...und alle Toten starben friedlich...). Close readings reveal Vertlib's increasing integration into Austrian culture, while stressing the global import of his dialogism and border crossings. (Author abstract)
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