It is not yet resolved. Post-memories of the Third Reich

Abstract

This essay offers a reflection on the concepts of identity and personal narrative, a line of argument that is closely interlaced with a subject’s capacity to self-representation. As self-representation is necessarily composed upon remembrance processes, the question of memory as a collective phenomenon that directly influences identitary mechanisms becomes an emergent topic. Bearing this objective in mind, I shall point at the different types of memory and will argue that not only experienced memories play a key role in this process; intermediated, received narratives from the past, memories transmitted either symbolically or by elder members of the group or, what has been meanwhile termed “postmemory”, also influence the development of an individual’s identitary map. I shall link these issues to the generations of individuals that were born in the aftermath of Germany’s National-Socialist dictatorship, particularly by focusing on the literary representations and personal perspectives of contemporary German and Austrian writers, whose texts represent the concepts of trauma, identity and (post)memory in central Europe’s historical, political and social context.