Futurity in Migration: Women?s Memory and Postnational Imagination in Contemporary German Literature
Creators: name: Beck-Soldner, Lauren
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Contemporary German Literature
subject: Futurity
subject: Post-Communism
subject: Gender
subject: Generations
subject: Memory
subject: Germanic Languages and Literature
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: This dissertation analyzes recent literature on women’s memory and genealogy as a site for negotiating selfhood, national narratives, and expectations for the future. I perform close readings of the novels The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998) by the post-Yugoslav author Dubravka Ugrešić, Aller Tage Abend (2012) by the (East) German author Jenny Erpenbeck, and ewig her und gar nicht wahr (2020) by the Jewish-Russian-German author Marina Frenk. These novels demonstrate a specific postcommunist sensibility developed through women’s memory and generational discourses. All three literary texts foreground multigenerational experiences of migration, long views of history, critical stances towards national constructs, trauma, and the problem of approaching the future. As the authors evaluate memory as narrative, they also construct and evaluate futures that could end cycles of violence. In this process, the acts of writing and reading emerge as a vital means to shape an informed future. In my readings, I show how the novels link the construction of memory to narrative creation and to women’s subjectivity. In their specific portrayals of migration, violence, and women’s subjectivity, the authors forefront the figure of the mother so that matrilineality emerges as an imaginary site for evading national systems. Generational memory shared within women’s communities is a constitutive category for postcommunist futurity. Meanwhile, gaps in memory created by gendered and state violence can be configured both as sites for subjective engagement with the past in the tradition of countermemory and as strict limitations on imagining certain redemptive futures. Furthermore, the novels’ narrative strategies, such as repetition, present tense narration, citation, fragmentation, and a-chronology, draw attention to memory as an ongoing practice for understanding and shaping the present and future. Throughout these narratives, the reader is implicated in the memory work. While the memory transmission between emplotted generational figures may lapse, the reader inherits a broader understanding of the circumstances preventing memory transmission, as well as the content of the memory itself. The reader’s position outside of the text and in the future of its historical context helps to enact the author’s future-oriented writerly engagement of memory. In the dissertation’s introduction, I situate the texts within scholarship on postcommunist Europe, the generation as form in literature, memory in contemporary literature, and futurity. In Chapter 1, I identify Berlin as a site of overlapping histories and estrangement that reflect the conditions of war in Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. I examine how Ugrešić’s narrator reapproaches her estranged relationship with her mother in exile through writing. I finally evaluate a divinatory practice for women’s imagination of the future. In Chapter 2, I analyze memory and repetition in Erpenbeck’s Aller Tage Abend. Through the novel’s description of effaced futures and histories of violence in the Soviet Union, I show how this impacts generational relationships through the loss of memory and the ambiguous future scope of the next generation. In Chapter 3, I examine Frenk’s debut novel ewig her und gar nicht wahr. In it, subjective engagement with family history and its impact on the present are all approached through visual media (photography, painting) and the unconscious; maternal estrangement and anger emerge as constitutive generational problems to be overcome. I find that Frenk gestures towards the possibility of a future are at once both free from the impacts of generational trauma and also deeply informed by it.