'Hast du ein Gedächtnis?' : memory and the representation of the past in the early narratives of Günter Grass.

Hall, Katharina Annemarie (1998) 'Hast du ein Gedächtnis?' : memory and the representation of the past in the early narratives of Günter Grass. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

This thesis examines the mediation of the past through memory and language within the early narratives of Günter Grass in conjunction with the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The thesis focuses on Grass's first five narrative works: Die Blechtrommel (1959), Katz und Maus (1960), Hundejahre (1961) (the 'Danzig Trilogy'), the novel örtlich betäubt (1969) and the prose-documentary work Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972). These texts centre collectively on the National Socialist past and the issue of engaging with the past in the post-war years (integrated into a consideration of social and political issues in the Germany of the 1960s/1970s in the case of the last two works). This set of thematic concerns, together with the dominant use of the first-person narrator to mediate the past in the post-war years, opens up questions within each of these texts around memory and the representation of the past. The preoccupation of psychoanalysis with memory, language and narratives of the past allows the use of Freudian and Lacanian concepts to explore the narrator's relation to his past as well as the dynamics between the text and the implied reader.

The thesis begins by exploring the conceptualizations of memory in Grass's early works. It shows memory to be figured both as a form of testimony and as a representation of past events. The thesis argues that Freud's notion of 'Nachträglichkeit', further developed by Lacan in his notion of 'remémoration', is implicit in the works' awareness of the representational nature of memory. This model of memory, together with the Lacanian exposition of the subject's relation to the orders of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, allows an exploration of the narrators' shifting representations of the past. The notion of transference is used to show how the inherently dialogic structure of these narratives lays bare Imaginary misrepresentations of the past in language and points towards an authentic engagement with the past in the Symbolic. The Lacanian insistence on the interconnection of the subject and society through language enables these individual struggles with the past to be read in the wider context of the tensions between the history of National Socialism and the post-war present of the 1950s/1960s.

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