Graduate Student, School of European Languages and Literatures
Thesis Title: "Someone will have to clear away the ruins": Dubravka Ugrešić and Trümmerliteratur Redux
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Michael Hanne
Nina Nola |
About
Framed by Heinrich Böll’s programmatic essay “Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur” (“Commitment to a Literature of the Ruins,” 1952), and Slovenian writer Drago Jančar’s idea of a “literature of the ‘eastern European ruins’” (2004), my recently submitted doctoral thesis is primarily concerned with the post-Yugoslav writings of novelist and essayist Dubravka Ugrešić as literary responses to both the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Centring on Ugrešić’s writings, I suggest that since the end of communism eastern European writers have been forced to confront the manifold ruins of language, literature, a utopian (yet disgraced) ideology, a distinct cultural space, not to mention almost half a century of everyday life, one inevitably buried as belonging to a compromised past. In this respect, in the post-1989 period, eastern European writers created what might be instructively called Trümmerliteratur Redux, a body of literature underpinned and scarred by the semantic field of ruins: melancholia and nostalgia, loss and restoration, presence and absence, pride and shame, and not least, remembering and forgetting. Examining the polysemic figure of the ruin in writings by Ugrešić and others, I propose Trümmerliteratur Redux as an amorphous, anti-formative framework within postcommunist literary studies, one that also dramatically illuminates the post-1989 ruins of eastern European literature itself—what remains when, as György Konrád put it, “something is over.”
