Abstract
The conjunction of methodological categories from narratology and cultural memory studies used as the basic approach in this article allows to define how fictional narrative structures could be functionalised for cultural memory formation. The analysis of a trilogy written by Ilse Tielsch has revealed two important memory strategies.
The strategy of subjectified documentation draws on the potential of evidence and testimony with the aim to prevent the past from being lost. At the same time, the claims to both completeness and faithful depiction of historical events are being undermined by various narrative techniques.
The second memory strategy is just as ambivalent. In the course of the exclusive montage, there are being reconstructed both the past and the present frames of reference typical for different social circles around the narrator.
As a consequence, the pure communicative memory has been exceeded. These complex subjectivising memory strategies developed by Ilse Tielsch distinguish her novels from the literature on the flight and expulsion of Germans written in the 1980s.