Contested Memory and Narrative within GDR-Polish Intercultural Landscapes: Ursula Höntsch’s Wir Flüchtlingskinder (1985) and Wir sind keine Kinder mehr (1990)

Abstract

This article demonstrates how literary studies can contribute to a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of borders, not least by exploring Mark Salter’s concept of the “performativity of the border, the ways that borders are given meaning through practices” in two interlinked works set within these cultural borderlands. In her semi-autobiographical novels Wir Flüchtlingskinder (1985) and Wir sind keine Kinder mehr (1990), the East German writer Ursula Höntsch, unknowingly writing in the final years of the country’s existence, challenges traditional GDR depictions of the German-Polish relationship and offers a dynamic exploration of personal, cultural and political “bordering and de-bordering” (Parker and Vaughan-Williams). Unusually for GDR literature, Höntsch presents Poland as an alternative political reality from which the GDR, still seeking to embody “socialism on German soil,” might learn. Taking as a starting-point the migrant experience of Höntsch’s protagonist and the subsequent cross-border friendship she develops, the article explores the limitations of externally imposed geo-political borders in shaping identity and controlling individual agency within contested spaces of cultural and communicative memory (Jan Assmann, 1988 and Aleida Assmann, 2016). The article concludes that Höntsch’s conscious exploitation of diverse genre forms and narrative voices, linguistic variation and intertextuality constitutes a creative engagement with the very fluidity of narrative boundaries that itself represents an exemplar of Salter’s border performativity.