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Remembering East German Childhood in Post-Wende Life Narratives" (2013)

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Remembering East German Childhood in Post-Wende Life Narratives Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2013 Remembering East German Childhood In Post- Wende Life Narratives Juliana Mamou Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the German Literature Commons Recommended Citation Mamou, Juliana, "Remembering East German Childhood In Post-Wende Life Narratives" (2013). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 735. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. REMEMBERING EAST GERMAN CHILDHOOD IN POST-WENDE LIFE NARRATIVES by JULIANA MAMOU DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2013 MAJOR: MODERN LANGUAGES (German Studies) Approved by: _____________________________________ Advisor Date _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ © COPYRIGHT BY JULIANA MAMOU 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my great appreciation to the members of my Dissertation Committee, Professor Donald Haase, Professor Lisabeth Hock, and Professor Anca Vlasopolos, for their constructive input, their patience, and support. I am particularly grateful for the assistance given by my Doktormutter, Professor Anne Rothe, as well as for her ability to accommodating my ever changing schedule throughout the planning and development of phases of this work, for her encouraging words in times of stress, and her overall guidance. Many thanks also to the graduate advisor, Professor Michael Giordano, for his valuable professional advice and support. I am also grateful to my family and friends in Germany who helped me to critically evaluate my arguments about the current state of affairs in the former East Germany. My cousin, Jens Schöne, in particular, provided me with extensive reading recommendations and insights. I am particularly grateful to my dear friend, Megan McKnight, whose ‘nagging’, to which I had agreed more than 5 years ago, continually reminded me to push forward and not lose sight of my academic accomplishments. Her interest and support are deeply appreciated. Last but certainly not least, I extend special thanks to my husband, Ed Mamou, who supported me above and beyond all expectations, and to our sons, Luke and Oliver. I am glad to have accomplished this task despite the additional challenges of raising small children. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments __________________________________________________ ii Chapter One: Introduction ____________________________________________ 1 Chapter Two: Theoretical Framework - Trauma, Memory, Identity ____________ 11 II.1. Cultural Trauma and Culture Shock ________________________ 15 II. 2. Collective Memory as Identity Construction __________________ 41 II. 3. Discursive Interaction between Memory and Identity in Literature _ 64 Chapter Three: Ostalgie - Explorations of a Discourse ____________________ 116 III.1. Nostalgia ____________________________________________ 117 III.2. Embracing Ostalgie in Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder____________ 136 III.3. Disclaiming Ostalgie in Claudia Rusch’s Meine freie deutsche Jugend _____________________________________________ 160 Chapter Four: Remembering the East German Heimat ___________________ 181 IV. 1. Remembering Childhood Places in Robert Ide’s Geteilte Träume 199 IV.2. Mourning the East German Heimat in Jana Simon’s Denn wir sind anders __________________________________________ 214 IV.3. Heimat and Identity in Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder____________ 228 Chapter Five: The Ossi as the Wessi’s Other - Constructing Ossi Identity in Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder, Jana Simon’s Denn wir sind anders, and Claudia Rusch’s Meine freie deutsche Jugend _______________ 235 V. 1. The Idealization of Ossis in Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder _______ 258 V. 2. Jana Simon’s Denn wir sind anders and Claudia Rusch’s Meine freie deutsche Jugend as a Critical Appreciation of East German Otherness ___________________________________________ 272 Chapter Six: Conclusion ___________________________________________ 291 References ___________________________________________________ 302 Abstract ___________________________________________________ 323 Autobiographical Statement ________________________________________ 326 Chapter One: Introduction In November of 2002, Norbert Kron reported in Der Tagesspiegel an increase in life narratives that focus on personal memories of childhood and adolescence spent in the GDR and during the Wende period. Moreover, he argued that a new sub-genre in life narratives was emerging and references, among others, Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder and Jana Simon’s Denn wir sind anders. This thematic sub-genre comprises the memory stories of authors of the last East German generation, born in the early to mid 1970s, who explore how they became who they are. In other words, they seek to understand how their disparate East German childhood and post-unification young adulthood informed their identities. Kron argues that literary critics had already attempted to capture this new literary trend by employing such labels as Generation Trabant or Generation ’89 in analogy to their West German cohort known by Florian Illies’ Generation Golf. Yet, while sharing not only demographic characteristics but also biographical experience—as conveyed in their narratives—some of these authors, Jochen Schmidt for instance, reject the notion that they could be categorized under a common denominator. These rejections are surprising and puzzling to Kron, who thus calls them a “ein verblüffendes Phänomen” (“a bewildering phenomenon”) (Der Tagesspiegel November 17, 2002) because they contradict his understanding of the concept of generation and the fact that he subsumes these authors repeatedly as belonging to the same cohort for which he adopts Hensel’s title Zonenkinder (children from the Eastern German zone). Kron’s reaction to the adverse reactions of newer authors indicates that his understanding of a generational cohort corresponds to that of literary scholars such as Jörg Magenau, Katrin Völkner, Aleida Assmann, and Wolfgang Emmerich as well as historians Hans-Hermann Hertle and Stefan Wolle who expanded Karl Mannheim’s classic discussion “The Problem of Generations” (1923). They argue that the concept of generation describes a cohort approximately of the same age who shared core socialization experiences and hence have similar values, and as such constitutes a “community of shared experience” (Magenau & Völkner 102). Hertle and Wolle write that the term generation cannot be verified empirically and constitutes as broadly defined concept. Nonetheless, they emphasize that the multiplicity of diverse experiences has a common denominator (Hertle & Wolle 101). Similarly, Aleida Assmann argues that shared forms of awareness and experience form the basis of a generation and that it is particularly in retrospect that the memories generate an intra-generational bond and inter-generational differentiation as the experiences become apparent as distinct from the subsequent generational cohort (Assmann, “Generationsidentitäten” 21). In retrospect, we have gained some distance from the experience, which enables us to see the bigger picture and to contextualize the event in a life story that makes its distinctive aspects more apparent (Assmann, 2006 21). Thus, retrospectively, individuals can look beyond the idiosyncrasies of their own experiences and come to understand much of it as generation-specific. They come to realize the similarity between intra-generational memories compared to inter- generational ones. In other words, Assmann argues that this realization gives rise to the notion of one’s partaking in a generational cohort that defines themselves based on what differentiates them from others and what they have in common with each other because of when and where they were born and raised (22). The generational cohort that is at the center of my discussion is very much aware of the differences between their own and both previous GDR generations, which are comprised of East Germans born in the 1920s through 1940s and those born between 1940 and 1970. All three GDR generations have been identified by historians: the oldest age cohort of GDR citizens that, according to Hertle and Wolle, can be considered a generation consists of those people who experienced the end of World War II as young adults. It marked the end of old beliefs and values with the capitulation of the Third Reich and a new start in building a better Germany. However, this generation also expressed continuity in their at least latent longing for “einer Instanz, die niemals irrt” (“an authority that never errs”) (Hertle and Wolle 101) that many of them would ascribe to the SED, East Germany’s leading party. They would continue their strong ideological beliefs despite such shattering events as the revelations about Stalin’s crimes, the 1953 uprising in the GDR and the final sealing off of East Germany from the West with the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The second generational cohort, Hertle and Wolle identify, shared the short-lived outrage against the Soviet intervention during the Prague Spring in 1968. In order to prevent open
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