Memory in Transit: New Perspectives on World War II in Contemporary European Fiction

• Applicant: Dr. Jan Lensen
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 214842932

This project investigates how contemporary literature in Germany, the Netherlands and Flanders renegotiates established memory narratives of the Second World War. More specifically, it pursues the question to what extent and in what ways the current generation of writers attempts to reassess, deconstruct and bridge collective identities anchored in these narratives. This question is inspired by the hypothesis that the shared historical distance to World War II, along with the profound political and economic transformations across Europe since 1989, has prompted a fresh take on the past. In order to test its veracity and to answer the larger research question it entails, I aim to analyze selected (re)writings of memory narratives of World War II in German, Dutch and Flemish literature, focusing on the nexus of poetics and ethics in the (de)construction of collective notions of self and other (particularly, of victims and perpetrators). With its decidedly comparative angle, this study is furthermore interested in processes of memory transfer across geo-political and temporal (transgenerational) borders, asking whether we can identify a transnational trend in contemporary European literature on the war. If so, this would entail the reconceptualization of the category of “generation,” which has so far served to implement a strictly chronological structure in the body of post-war literature, in predominantly poetic and ethical terms. Besides being able to account for genealogical overlaps in contemporary writings on the war, such fresh theoretical account of ‘thirdgeneration’ literature could also allow us to examine literature’s role in opening up a transnational, discursive space, in which different claims on the past can be brought together in the interest of working out a shared, post-traumatic European future.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants