The fall of the Berlin Wall and the so-called ‚Wende‘ (turnaround) mark a central historic turning point, a peripety, and has a special place in the collective memory. What happened can be described as a „Zeit-Zäsur“ (caesura in time) (Detmers/Ostheimer 2016), an event that requires societies to generate new concepts of time and demands new narratives. In the last 35 years, the topic remains a popular subject in contemporary literature, and in recent years it has become particularly prominent again, with a focus on the post-reunification years, the 90s and early 2000s (cf. Schumacher 2023).
My doctoral dissertation examines the formation of time in a corpus of about 15 German–language texts published since the 1990s and explores its relation to the narrative of radical changes happening during 1989 and its aftermath. Starting from Käte Hamburger’s elaborations on ‚Zeitgestaltung’ (1955), who states: „Ist die Zeit nicht thematisch, nicht gestaltet, nicht erzählt, so ‚ist‘ sie nicht in einem Dichtwerk. Sie ist nicht trotzdem da wie in der Wirklichkeit […] (Hamburger 1955, 418) (If time is not topical, not constructed, not narrated, then it ‚is‘ not in a work of poetry. It is not there nevertheless, like in reality […]; translated by Meister/Schernus 2011, 90). Hamburger describes ‚Zeitgestaltung‘ as a feature a literary text can have, what distinguishes the texts from others.
Narratives of the ‚Wende’, the early ones as well as contemporary novels, show a particular affinity for narrating and forming time. Based on an aesthetically reflected understanding of ‚Zeitgestaltung‘, I would like to pursue an analytical approach that takes into account both the formal design and the semantic thematisation of time in narrative texts. I will argue that the changed perception of time after 1989 finds its way into the narratives on a formal level and influences the texts by narrating the ‚Wende’ as a loss of time, ‚in-between-time’ or transitional waiting time rather than as an immediate change, a peripetic moment or an instantaneous event.
Following Aristotle’s understanding of peripety and adding reflections of Viktor Šklovskij (1984), the temporal extension of the ‚Wende’ exceed the outlines of one single defining moment. Instead, these years are better described as a transitional period, which then follows or encompasses the peripety. Regarding the literary texts, it is characteristic that in confronting the disrupted temporal order, the texts often do not narrate a singular peripety but rather seem to shape this in-between-time through their formation of time.
Further reading
Detmers, Ines/Ostheimer, Michael: „Das temporale Imaginäre. Von der Latenz des Zeitlichen zur Emergenz kultureller Zeit“. In: Anna-Katharina Gisbertz und Michael Ostheimer (Hgg.): Geschichte – Latenz – Zukunft. Zur narrativen Modellierung von Zeit in der Gegenwartsliteratur. Hannover: Wehrhahn 2017, S. 15-28.
Schumacher, Eckhard: „Eskalation erzählen. Nachwendenarrationen als Gewaltgeschichte.“ In: Merkur 895 (2023), S. 16-29.
Hamburger, Käte: „Die Zeitlosigkeit der Dichtung“. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 29 (1955), S. 413-426.
Šklovskij, Viktor: Theorie der Prosa. Herausgegeben und aus dem Russischen übersetzt von Gisela Drohla, Frankfurt: Fischer 1984.