"Ich bin ein Betweener": the concept of the existential migrant in Steffen Möller's travel narratives about Poland. Issue 1 (2nd January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kazecki, Jakub
• Is Part Of: Canadian Slavonic papers. Volume 61:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 81
• Page End: 98
• Publication Date: 2019-01-02
• Subjects: Steffen Möller -- migrant literature -- travel narratives -- Poland -- German-Polish authors; Slavic philology -- Periodicals; 891.8
• DOI: 10.1080/00085006.2018.1557452
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0008-5006

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article discusses the German-Polish author Steffen Möller and his self-presentation as a "betweener" in the works Viva Polonia (2008), Expedition to the Poles (2012), and Viva Warszawa (2015). The article construes it as a central concept of Möller's narratives about Poland by connecting it with Greg Madison's phenomenon of "existential migration." The analysis of the motif of train travel in Möller's oeuvre points out the author's rendering of Marc Augé's "non-places" as spatial zones of transition and heterotopias, which accommodate shifting senses of time and place, allow for the subverting of established social hierarchies and narrative structures, and are characterized by their own idiom and avoidance of linearity.