Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
Forum for Modern Language Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
56,4 (2020) 406-426
Keywords:
Petrowskaja, Katja,
;
Menasse, Robert,
;
German fiction Jewish authors
;
History and criticism
;
Austrian fiction Jewish authors
;
History and criticism
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Commemoration
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
;
Memory in literature
Abstract:
This article examines subjunctive approaches to history and memory as a novel aesthetic and ethical mode of Holocaust (post-)memory in two prominent examples of contemporary German-Jewish fiction. I argue that Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) and Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt (2017) develop subjunctive modes of Holocaust (post-)memory as a response to a crisis of witnessing in the post-survivor era. Faced with the dying out of the survivor generation and the increasing institutionalization and hypermediation of Holocaust memories, these two authors invoke the subjunctive to self-reflexively account for their historical positionality and critique monolithic memory discourses (Petrowskaja), while also aiming to (re-)invest a stagnant culture of Holocaust memory with political urgency and futurity (Menasse). Subjunctivity thus emerges as a central yet underexamined mode of contemporary German-Jewish writing which has the potential to transform wider cultures of Holocaust (post-)memory, by moving ‘beyond the traumatic’ (Rigney 2018) in the direction of futurity.
DOI:
10.1093/fmls/cqaa026
URL:
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