Brangwen Stone

This article focuses on Christa Wolf’s 1996 novel  Medea. Stimmen . It explores how Wolf uses the motif of colonialism to refigure the ancient myth of Medea into a narrative that highlights gendered colonial discourse and oppression, also canvassing to what extent the novel can be read as an allegory of post-reunification Germany. Keywords : Christa Wolf; colonialism;  Wendeliteratur ; Medea; GDR

The novel Gehen, ging, gegangen [Go, Went, Gone] by the celebrated German writer Jenny Erpenbeck was published at the height of the European refugee crisis. The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired Berlin classics professor, who becomes intrigued by the Oranienplatz refugee protest camp. He initially approaches the refugee crisis as a new research project, methodically searching for secondary literature, composing questionnaires and conducting interviews with asylum seekers, but eventually he begins to develop friendships with some of them. Throughout the novel, Richard, who fled from the approaching Red Army with his mother as a baby and then lived in the GDR until reunification, notices similarities between the traumatic experiences of the Oranienplatz protesters and the trauma in his personal history, German collective history, and ancient and medieval literature. This article focuses on trauma and empathy in Gehen, ging, gegangen, exploring how the parallels drawn between the varied fates of the asylum seekers and the stories of exile and displacement in the literary canon, and German historical experiences of displacement and loss of home, establish points of empathic connection between Richard and the refugees, and attempt to establish the same between the reader and the refugees.

Das deutschsprachige Drama erfreut sich in Australien eines ungebrochenen Interesses, gerade auch in Zeiten eines verstärkten internationalen Austausches. Dies mag erstaunen, da es aufgrund der geringeren Einwohnerzahl in Australien generell ein relativ kleines Publikum gibt. Wenn man Faktoren wie Alter und grundsätzliches Interesse am Theater unbeachtet lässt, beträgt die potentielle Zuschauerzahl in Australien ungefähr ein Viertel des jeweiligen deutschen, österreichischen und Schweizer Publikums. Was zunächst wie ein überflüssiges Zahlenspiel anmutet, spielt in einer Kultur, in der Theater und Performing Arts sich in starkem Maße durch den Verkauf von Eintrittskarten finanzieren, eine wichtige Rolle, wenn es um die Produktion und Rezeption von Dramen und Theater aus dem Ausland geht. Wie die Kritikerin Alison Croggon kürzlich feststellte, gibt es trotz (oder wegen) des von starker kultureller Vielfalt geprägten australischen Theaters immer wieder die Diskussion, wie stark australische Dramatiker gegenüber ausländischen Kollegen auf den hiesigen Bühnen vertreten sein sollten.

What does it mean to have lost a homeland and a home community—and to have done so, moreover, under such politically complex circumstances? How did the differing refugee and resettlement policies of East and West Germany shape refugee experience and hence narratives of return? And how is return itself understood, given the eventual insistence of both German governments (even in the process of reunification) that the Oder-Neisse line remain Germany’s permanent border? In other words, what does individual, temporary return feel like when the possibility of collective, permanent return remains politically foreclosed? This book takes on a central yet underexplored subject, the way postwar German literature (and film) reflects on the loss of the German lands, through the lens of visits to former homes. It explores narratives of return to Central and Eastern Europe in four clusters of German-language literature and film from the post-war years to the present, including German-Jewish accounts of return to 1960s Wroc?aw, GDR fiction of the 60s and 70s, fictional narratives of return to the Czech lands after the Velvet Revolution, and documentary films by Volker Koepp and Helke Misselwitz.