Information about the author: 

Abstract:

The publication examines the phenomenon of postmemory in the novels of M. Maron, U. Timm and K. Petrowskaja. The term “postmemory”, justified by M. Hirsch, denotes the attitude of descendants to the collective cultural and personal trauma received by the generation of predecessors as a result of catastrophic historical events. Modern German literature has been swept by a wave of autobiographical prose, in which authors born after the Second World War or those who experienced it in the early childhood explore the history of their family, as well as the influence of the traumatic experiences of the older generation on their own biography. The novels by M. Maron, U. Timm, and K. Petrowskaja discussed in the article belong to a hybrid genre that arises at the intersection of a family novel, autobiography, and travelogue, for which it is proposed to use W. D. Sedelnik’s term “family study”. These novels depict the process of reconstruction of the family past by the author, relying on various testimonies, photographs, historical sources, while the “gaps” in the knowledge are filled with the work of imagination. The studying of the past in the “family studies” is accompanied by self- and metareflection on memory, forgetting and creativity. The article examines the characteristic features of the poetics of the novels of M. Maron, U. Timm and K. Petrowskaja: documentary, fragmentation, intermediality and intertextuality.