B. AS IN BALKAN: TERÉZIA MORA'S POST‐YUGOSLAV BERLIN REPUBLIC*. (April 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mayr, Maria
• Is Part Of: German life and letters. Volume 67:Number 2(2014:Apr.)
• Page Start: 242
• Page End: 259
• Publication Date: 2014-04
• Subjects: German literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Germany -- Periodicals; Germany -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; Germany -- Civilization -- Periodicals; 830.9
• DOI: 10.1111/glal.12041
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0016-8777

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="main"> <title>ABSTRACT</title> <p>In this article, I argue that Terézia Mora's 2004 novel <italic>Alle Tage</italic> foregrounds the Yugoslav wars, and the Kosovo intervention in particular, as significant events for processes of the Berlin Republic's political self‐fashioning in the late 1990s. I therefore contend that despite the text's more widely acknowledged global and delocalised aspects, <italic>Alle Tage</italic> is in fact a very local and 'German' text, directly engaging with the socio‐political contexts of the Berlin Republic. I start by addressing the ways in which the 1990s Balkan wars have been used to reposition questions of German identity in relation to its World War II past. I then examine and offer an alternative to the notion that Térezia Mora's novel <italic>Alle Tage</italic> is predominantly a global text by highlighting the text's inextricable embeddedness in discourses surrounding German identity in the 1990s. I do so by tracing the novel's simultaneous critiques of both the notion of a global, nomadic way of being as well as of essentialist conceptions of community such as a nation or ethnic belonging. As the fate of the novel's main character Abel illustrates, for Mora belonging is instead a matter of an embodied, experiential access to both one's past and present. I conclude by arguing that Mora's novel suggests that just like Abel, Germany cannot move beyond post‐war themes such as nationalism, war, and genocide without thereby committing violent acts of forgetting.</p> </abstract>