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This book addresses how contemporary prose fiction from Germany, Flanders, and the Netherlands deals with the memory of World War II. More in particular, it offers an investigation of how the temporal distance to the war events affects matters of form and content in these contemporary narratives.
List of contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
The Generation of Meta-Memory: An Introduction
Part I - Of Perpetrators and Victims
Chapter 1 - 'Ein verwandter Ton': The (Im)possibility of German Victimhood in Marcel Beyer's
Flughunde (1995)
Chapter 2 - 'In Search of a More Bearable Tomb': Narrative Integration and Heteroglossia in Erwin Mortier's
Marcel (1999)
Chapter 3 - The Comfort Corner of Victimhood: Holocaust Victimhood in Arnon Grunberg's
De joodse messias (2004)
Part II - Memory on the Move?
Chapter 4 - The Names of the Dead in Our Communal Cemeteries: The Case for a European Collective Memory in Koen Peeters's
Grote Europese roman (2007)
Chapter 5 - Claiming Memory Citizenship in Mano Bouzamour's
De belofte van Pisa (2014)
Chapter 6 - Moving in and out of the Feedback Loop: History and 'Globital' Memory in Peter Verhelst's
Zwerm (2005)
Part III - The Play with Memory
Chapter 7 - 'Irgendwo zwischen Müllverbrennungsanlage und dem bleistiftförmigen Fallturm der Universität': Personal Memory and Autofiction in Per Leo's
Flut und Boden (2014)
Chapter 8 - 'Wir stören uns nicht daran': Stylistic Refinement and the Play with Referentiality in Kevin Vennemann's
Nahe Jedenew (2005)
Chapter 9 - 'With a stretched arm. Like Superman, not like Hitler': Irreverent Play with Memory in
Astronaut van Oranje (2013) by Andy Fierens and Michaël Brijs
Afterword: A Move out of the Grip of the Past?
Index
About the author
Jan Lensen is an affiliated researcher at the Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie of the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of
De foute oorlog: Schuld en nederlaag in het Vlaamse proza over de Tweede Wereldoorlog (2014) and has widely published about contemporary Dutch and German literature and cultural memory in international peer-reviewed journals, such as
Journal of Dutch Literature,
Comparative Literature and
Modern Language Review.
Summary
This book addresses how contemporary prose fiction from Germany, Flanders, and the Netherlands deals with the memory of World War II. More in particular, it offers an investigation of how the temporal distance to the war events affects matters of form and content in these contemporary narratives.
