Fathers literature

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The term father's literature is used to describe a genre of heterogeneous texts (Reidy) in which authors deal with their relationships with their father and, in the narrower sense, especially with his Nazi past. The authors who are subsumed under this term come almost exclusively from Germany or Austria.

Delimitations

The boundaries between a “father's book” and a “ generation book ” are fluid and not clearly defined in literary studies. A “father's book” like a “parent's book” can belong to the genre of advice literature. A “generation book” can also mean a generation novel or a family novel.

Functions

A father book can have several functions for the author. It can be used to make a public memory of his father in question to explain his actions in retrospect or interpret in a desired, subjective way public with the Father "settle" or - in a broader sense - the public memory of a father preserve. It can be part of a private coming to terms with the past and it can serve the collective coming to terms with the past. Some German-language father books became part of the process of coming to terms with the Nazi past .

About history

In the 1970s, Marcel Reich-Ranicki coined the term New Subjectivity for a current trend in German literature that focused on very personal issues in an author's private life. Also in the 1970s, the term “father's literature” came up for texts in which the generation of sons and daughters dealt with the Nazi past of their fathers. In 1975 Peter Henisch's The Little Figure of My Father appeared . In 1979 Sigfrid Gauch published the story Vaterspuren . Gauch tells the past of his father Hermann Gauch , a doctor and Nazi racial theorist . The book is primarily about the conflict between the son and the father, but also about feelings of guilt. The book was published in 1982 by Athenäum Verlag and in 1982 as a paperback by Suhrkamp Verlag . In 2005 a revised and supplemented new edition came out and in 2010 the supplementary volume "Fundsachen. The sources for the novel Vaterspuren". In 1980 Christoph Meckel's Suchbild appeared. About my father . These two "father's books" are also considered to be the forerunners of a boom in family narratives in the 1990s.

In January 2011, Walter Kohl , a son of long-time Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl , published his book Live or be lived: Steps on the Path to Reconciliation , in which he describes his personal career and how he dealt with the special circumstances of his childhood and youth and the very different ones Describes relationships with the father and mother and deals with the mother's suicide. The book received extensive media coverage and was number one on the bestseller lists for weeks. His second book, about reconciliation with one's fate, was published in May 2013.

The probably first “grandchildren's book” to become known to the general public was published in 2004 (as a paperback in 2006): Silence the perpetrators - the grandchildren speak . In it, Claudia Brunner (* 1972) and Uwe von Seltmann (* 1964) trace the life of their great-uncle Alois Brunner and his grandfather Lothar von Seltmann . (Brunner was one of Adolf Eichmann's most important collaborators in realizing the so-called “ Final Solution to the Jewish Question ”; as an SS man, Seltmann was involved in the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising .)

List of examples from the Nazi era

  • Sigfrid Gauch : Traces of the father. Athenaeum, Königstein 1979, 1990, 1997.
  • Peter Härtling : Love brought back. Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1980, 1982.
  • Paul Kersten : The everyday death of my father. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1978.
  • Christoph Meckel : Suchbild: About my father. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1980.
  • Ernst Rauter : Letter to my educators. Weismann, Munich 1979, 1980.
  • Ruth Rehmann : The man in the pulpit: questions to a father. Hanser, Munich 1979. (English: The Man in the Pulpit. University of Nebraska, Lincoln 1997)
  • Brigitte Schwaiger : Long absence. Zsolnay, Hamburg 1980; Rowohlt, 1982.
  • Bernward Vesper : The Journey. Two thousand and one, Frankfurt 1979.
  • Heinrich Wiesner : The giant at the table. Lenos, Basel 1979.

Later examples

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julian Reidy: 'fathers Literature' as a literary historical problem case. P. 69.
  2. ↑ Julian Reidy distinguishes between dialogical father books and monological father books in his dissertation (published 2012); it also covers functions that these books can have.
  3. ^ Ariane Eichenberg: Family-I-Nation. Narrative analyzes of contemporary generation novels. Göttingen 2009, p. 12. For an overview of the father's literature see ibid., P. 13ff.
  4. ↑ Live what you feel. About the freedom to be happy. The way of reconciliation. focus.de: Interview (May 30, 2013)