Traumatic (Self) Exile: Narrative Marginalization in Recent and Postwar German Fiction

abstract:This article examines representations of migrants in Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and Bodo Kirchhoff’s 2016 novella Widerfahrnis. I locate these texts in historical and literary contexts, the roots of which can be traced to the first generation of postwar German literature, particularly the works of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. In both Grass’s and Böll’s postwar fiction, German experiences of the war and its aftermath are foregrounded, and focus is placed on German postwar trauma, while the Jewish victims of the Holocaust remain in the background. This article proposes a thematic continuum between the postwar texts of Böll and Grass and the more recent novels Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and Widerfahrnis: in each literary era, the experience of the white German male is foregrounded, effectively erasing the experience of marginalized figures.