Corporality and quotations - stabilizers of memories of the transfer/expulsion in novels by Jakuba Katalpa and Reinhard Jirgl
Abstract
This study deals with the strategies behind the literary representation of the transfer/ expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia in the novel Němci (Germans) by Jakub Katalpa (2012) and Die Unvollendeten (The Unfinished) by Reinhard Jirgl (2003). It focuses on two marginal methods of literary remembrance: memory of corporality and allegorical quotation, which following on from Aleida Assmann are understood to be specific "memory stabilizers".
Mute material indices imprinted in the corporality of Katulpa's characters and objects may only survive the disintegration of social memory frameworks to the extent that a memory remains in its muteness beyond any discursivity, which is constantly subject to change. Likewise the quotation strategy, which in "second presence" mode attempts to attain a fleeting memory of the transfer, only accomplishes this at the price of the fragmentation of the memory and its alternating (self-)reference.
The study concludes by focusing on the specific nature of the literariness of these recall strategies and their practical consequences in contemporary Czech and German remembrance culture.