In einem Echoraum der Geschichte – Kresy und Schlesien als Erinnerungsorte einer polnisch-deutschen Schicksalsgemeinschaft am Beispiel des Romans Katzenberge von Sabrina Janesch

• Authors: Ratajczak Marta

Title variants

EN

In an echo chamber of history - Kresy and Silesia as the memorial sites of the Polish-German community of memories in the novel "Katzenberge" by Sabrina Janesch

• Languages of publication: DE EN

Abstracts

EN

The purpose of this paper on the novel Katzenberge (Cat’s Mountains) by Sabrina Janesch is to locate it in the context of a debate on the German memory culture(s) and its representation in Germanlanguage literary texts. This classification is justified by a specific regional and generational character of the war memories in the novel. Within this short observation, the author of the paper is interested not only in historical, sociological and cultural study questions, which are connected directly to this topic, but primarily and especially, in what way and using what means the pictures of Silesia and of Kresy were created as memorial sites in the novel Katzenberge (Cat’s Mountains), which is based on autobiographical motifs. The research problem, which appears in this study, can be formulated as follows: In the PolishGerman history of forced resettlements from the period of World War II, there are gaps whose existence in a more or less significant way distorts the perception of this issue, both at the level of historical reconstruction, in which certain aspects of common history are omitted, as well as at the level of reflection on them in literary texts. The article proposes a thesis that the novel Katzenberge (Cat’s Mountains) by Sabrina Janesch fills an important gap in German-language literature, which is the history of Polish refugees and people forcibly displaced from the Kresy to Silesia. Thus, the literary topography of this region expands, becoming a place where the fates of Polish Kresowians and German Silesians intersect and overlap, while the region itself assumes the form of a palimpsest. The following research methods were used: narratology and hermeneutics. These research methods allow in-depth analysis of the structure and content of the text, as well as facilitate an attempt to interpret it in the context of the issues under investigation.

Keywords

EN

culture(s) of memory; generational memory; communicative memory; a silent event; region-specific nature of war memory Silesia and Polish Eastern Borderlands as memorial places

• Publisher: Instytut Zachodni. Instytut Naukowo-Badawczy im. Zygmunta Wojciechowskiego w Poznaniu
• Journal: Przegląd Zachodni
• Year: 2019
• Issue: 1(370)
• Pages: 181-192

Contributors

author

Ratajczak Marta

• Instytut Filologii Germańskiej, Uniwersytet Zielonogórski