Fluchtgeschichten

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This new iteration of “Fluchtgeschichten” focuses on literary responses to three distinct historical situations in the 20th and 21st centuries that resulted in large-scale exile, flight, and/or forced migration: ● the persecution and exile of Jewish and/or politically progressive intellectuals and artists (among many others) during National Socialism and World War II; ● the expulsion at the end of World War II of approximately 12 million ethnic Germans from territories in the East and their flight towards the West (i.e., the countries that would become East and West Germany); ● the recent flight of large numbers of people from civil war in Syria and from other human rights crises on the African continent, and their attempts to enter Europe The genre of the novel, in particular, lends itself for multi-voiced approaches to these historical events and their effects on individuals. The seminar will examine how literature presents us with changing counter-discourses to at times politicized or one-dimensional public discourses. Some of these texts begin to address the legacies of exile, flight and migration in transnational European contexts. In the last part of the course, we look at recent creative texts that address the situation of refugees in contemporary Europe, sometimes by relating them to earlier instances of exile and forced migration. The figure of the refugee, as captured in Hannah Arendt’s 1943 autobiographical essay, will provide important points of reference for the discussion of some of the literary texts. Related sections of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism will be the focus of a workshop by Prof. David Kim (UCLA) in late October. Beyond the work of Arendt, this seminar draws on memory studies (especially M. Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory and M. Hirsch’s notion of postmemory) and competing notions of home/Heimat.