Das Geschichtsbild Walter Benjamins und die Inszenierung von Erinnerung in Regina Scheers Roman Machandel

Abstract:The following article discusses Regina Scheer's novel Machandel (2014) and the approach to personal memory and historical perception that Scheer develops by drawing on Walter Benjamin's famous essay On the Concepts of History, published in 1940. The article examines formal and narrative aspects of the novel, which tells the story of a family and an East German village from the 1930s until the present day, in order to demonstrate how Scheer rejects the possibility of direct access to history and the reconstruction of the past. Special attention is devoted to the specific meanings of different forms of silence and the role of literature in the process of cultural memory.