Die Bildung des Europäers – Kollektive und persönliche Identitäten im literarischen Werk von Maxim Biller

Abstract

The Formation of the European – Collective and Personal Identities in the Literary Works of Maxim Biller. “In a way, ‘Bildung’ (formation/culture) is unavoidable, like catarrh with an east wind,” Roland Reichenbach once paraphrased Theodor Fontane. Of course, a CV, a “curriculum vitae” (as Victor Klemperer called his diaries) may not be as institutionalized or professionalized as we expect from educational institutions. At the same time, some biographies and family dictionaries (Lessico famigliare, Natalia Ginzburg) seem to give more than enough reason for the formation of the person in the turmoil of the 20th and early 21st centuries, without a “harmonious whole” being able to emerge from it, of course, as it still did appear ideal to Wilhelm von Humboldt in the 19th century. Of course, this formation, which is not able to be an identity, i.e. equality with oneself, only happens when the person deals with their collective and individual becoming. If it does this in the form of ‘permanently fixed expressions of life’ (Dilthey), then this enables us as scholars in education to trace this fragmentary formation of the person in an exemplary manner. Maxim Biller, whose family history stretches from the Soviet Union through Czechoslovakia to Germany, Israel, and England, is a writer who has undertaken this questioning of himself and others in more or less fictitious and unsparingly autobiographical texts. These reflective processes of formation are traced in this article and the question is asked about how collective and familial influences can be turned around using the example of the multifaceted reconstruction of a European migration biography in the course of autobiographical literary work in such a way that, although no identity is formed, a consistent self is formed. This knowledge could become pedagogically relevant to develop ideas on how to deal with the breaks in the lives of people with migration experiences in the 21st century.