Postcatastrophic Narratives: Memory and Postmemory in German Literature after 1945

German culture after 1945 is determined by a changing relation toward its past: the horrors of National Socialism. This past was repressed, then gradually recognized, until it emerged as an essential part of German identity & politics in the 1980s. Literature played a role as a counter-memory of what had been officially forgotten, adopting a radically modern aesthetics to engage with Adorno’s dictum that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Literature attempts to represent the unrepresentable, developing a different poetics of memory and postmemory, in part with a political dimension that finds echoes in today’s postcolonial debates. After an introduction to the historical context & clarification of key concepts such as trauma, postmemory, & the politics of memory, we will discuss seminal texts by Paul Celan, W. G. Sebald, Alexander Kluge, Wolfgang Koeppen, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Uwe Johnson & others.