Memory in Transit: New Perspectives on World War II in Contemporary European Fiction

这个项目调查了德国、荷兰和弗兰德斯的当代文学如何重新谈判第二次世界大战的既定记忆叙事。更具体地说，它追求的问题是，在何种程度上，以何种方式，当代作家试图重新评估，解构和桥梁集体身份锚定在这些叙事。这个问题的灵感来自于这样一个假设，即与第二次世界大战的共同历史距离，沿着自1989年以来整个欧洲深刻的政治和经济变革，促使人们对过去有了新的认识。为了测试它的真实性，并回答更大的研究问题，它需要，我的目标是分析选定的（重新）在德国，荷兰和佛兰芒文学的第二次世界大战的记忆叙事的著作，专注于诗学和伦理学的关系（去）建设的集体概念的自我和其他（特别是，受害者和肇事者）。本研究以其明确的比较角度，进一步关注跨地缘政治和时间（跨代）边界的记忆转移过程，询问我们是否可以确定当代欧洲文学中关于战争的跨国趋势。如果是这样，这将需要对“一代”这一类别进行重新概念化，迄今为止，“一代”这一类别主要以诗歌和伦理术语在战后文学中实施了严格的时间顺序结构。除了能够解释当代关于战争的著作中的谱系重叠之外，这种对“第三代”文学的新的理论解释还可以让我们研究文学在开辟一个跨国的话语空间中的作用，在这个空间中，为了共同的、创伤后的欧洲未来，可以将对过去的不同主张汇集在一起。

This project investigates how contemporary literature in Germany, the Netherlands and Flanders renegotiates established memory narratives of the Second World War. More specifically, it pursues the question to what extent and in what ways the current generation of writers attempts to reassess, deconstruct and bridge collective identities anchored in these narratives. This question is inspired by the hypothesis that the shared historical distance to World War II, along with the profound political and economic transformations across Europe since 1989, has prompted a fresh take on the past. In order to test its veracity and to answer the larger research question it entails, I aim to analyze selected (re)writings of memory narratives of World War II in German, Dutch and Flemish literature, focusing on the nexus of poetics and ethics in the (de)construction of collective notions of self and other (particularly, of victims and perpetrators). With its decidedly comparative angle, this study is furthermore interested in processes of memory transfer across geo-political and temporal (transgenerational) borders, asking whether we can identify a transnational trend in contemporary European literature on the war. If so, this would entail the reconceptualization of the category of “generation,” which has so far served to implement a strictly chronological structure in the body of post-war literature, in predominantly poetic and ethical terms. Besides being able to account for genealogical overlaps in contemporary writings on the war, such fresh theoretical account of ‘thirdgeneration’ literature could also allow us to examine literature’s role in opening up a transnational, discursive space, in which different claims on the past can be brought together in the interest of working out a shared, post-traumatic European future.