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

这个项目调查了德国、荷兰和佛兰德的当代文学如何重新协商第二次世界大战的既定记忆叙事。更具体地说，它追问的问题是，当代作家试图在多大程度上以及以什么方式重新评估、解构和桥接植根于这些叙事中的集体身份。这个问题的灵感来自一种假设，即与二战有着共同的历史距离，以及自1989年以来整个欧洲发生的深刻的政治和经济变革，促使人们重新审视过去。为了测试它的真实性，并回答它所带来的更大的研究问题，我的目标是分析德国、荷兰和佛兰德文学中精选的(重新)二战记忆叙事作品，重点放在(去)构建集体的自我和他人概念(特别是受害者和肇事者)中诗学和伦理学的关系。这项研究以明确的比较视角，进一步关注跨越地缘政治和时间(跨代)边界的记忆转移过程，询问我们是否可以在当代欧洲关于战争的文学中发现一种跨国趋势。如果是这样的话，这将需要重新定义“一代”的范畴，到目前为止，这一范畴在战后文学中以诗意和伦理为主的术语实施了严格的时间结构。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描述还可以让我们审视文学在开辟一个跨国的话语空间中的作用，在这个空间中，关于过去的不同主张可以被汇集在一起，以制定一个共同的、创伤后的欧洲未来。

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.