Missing times of the 20th century. Narrative substitutes in the work of HERTA MÜLLER and BIRGIT WEYHE

Abstract

With increasing distance to the 20th century, time gaps come into focus and are thematized as such. As an example, HERTA MÜLLER’S novel Atemschaukel and its genesis shows how gaps in the family memory are later filled by notes from and conversations with Oskar Pastior, who like MÜLLER’S mother was a Soviet camp prisoner. This has enabled the author to compensate for the indigenous taboo on the camp period, in a ‘representative’ literary way through the fictional writer Leo Auberg. BIRGIT WEYHE, on the other hand, fills in missing periods in her family history in her graphic novel Im Himmel ist Jahrmarkt, mainly through verbal-pictorial inventions, which are explained right at the beginning of the graphic novel. In it, time gaps from the beginning of the 20th century are visualized and verbalized in such a way that the reliability of the narration always remains ambivalent. The comparison of the two works reveals differences and similarities in the literary treatment of absences in the family memory, for which, in both cases, a narrative substitute emerges.