Title: Heimat, loss and identity : flight and expulsion in German literature from the 1950s to the present /
Authors: Berger, Karina, 1977-
Year: 2015
Subjects: German fiction History and criticism.; German fiction History and criticism.; Displacement (Psychology) in literature.; Collective memory in literature
Abstract: What became of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe during the Second World War? In recent years, their suffering, flight and expulsion during and after the war has attracted increasing critical attention. A wave of literary fiction has accompanied this trend, contributing to, and sometimes triggering, heated debate in the media and German-speaking society more widely. Often said to have broken a {u2018}taboo{u2019}, these postunification novels are in fact only the latest in a long history of literary representations of flight and expulsion in German writing. This book offers the first comprehensive account in English of {u2018}expulsion literature{u2019} in West Germany from the early 1950s to present-day Germany, providing detailed readings of both canonical and lesser known texts and carefully placing the novels in their broader literary and historical context. The book demonstrates that these literary representations have often been viewed too narrowly and offers an alternative and, arguably, more positive perspective on the representation of flight and expulsion over six decades in German literature. -- from publisher's website.
Contents: Victims of fate: the representation of flight and expulsion in novels of the early postwar period -- A clear counter-discourse: expulsion novels during the politicized 1970s and 1980s -- The volte-face in the reception of Walter Kempowski: shifting attitudes towards (representations of) German wartime suffering -- An era of normalization? representations of flight and expulsion in postunification Germany.