Heimkehr? Narratives of Return to Central and Eastern Europe in German Literature.

摘要

This dissertation explores narratives of homecoming to Central and Eastern Europe in four clusters of German literature and film from the post-war period to the present. It examines many relatively unknown works, while also approaching some commonly studied texts, such as Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster and W G Sebald's Austerlitz, from a new angle. The first chapter focuses on two German-Jewish accounts of return to 1960s Wroclaw, formerly German Breslau. The second chapter concentrates on GDR narratives of homecoming to Eastern Europe. In these texts, which broach the politically sensitive topic of the expulsions and Germany's new postwar borders, the former home and the expulsions are tightly bound to the Nazi past. The third chapter considers narratives of return to the Czech lands after the Velvet Revolution and finds a cluster of works that are, on the whole, more absorbed with memory and the past than recent political events. The fourth, and final chapter, analyzes three documentary films of the last decade, and discovers that even in the new millennium the history of World War II continues to dog the eastward journey.;The journey to the former home is always a journey into the past -- both personal and historical. Memory is central to all of the returns and the encounter with the former home often excavates repressed or forgotten memories of the past. World War II haunts all of these narratives of return and although many of the returnees are German-Jewish emigres or Czech exiles, rather than German expellees per se, the expulsion of ethnic Germans is nonetheless touched upon in almost all of the texts. The dissertation thus confounds the frequently made claim that there was a taboo on the expulsions in German literature until a decade ago.