Abstract
This article connects the theory of intertextuality and the concept of memory transformation. The transformations of mnemonic contents and the various forms of presentation that they have gone through before they crystallized in the texts are mostly invisible. In order to uncover these processes, Astrid Erll calls attention to the “travel” of memories. Based on intertextual theory, my analysis aims to distill categories for examining the transformative character of literary memory. For this purpose, I analyze the following three types of transformative memories—transgenerational postmemory, affiliative postmemory, and co-memoration—based on appropriate case studies. The categories of intertextual analysis that will be worked out in the article are as follows: The elements of intertextuality, the communicative acts between the previous and the manifest text that can be described as figures of intertextuality shaped by the specificity of each type of transformative memory; and the meta-content of intertextual transformation, that is, the characteristic purpose or quaestio that each memory transformation involves and that can be seen the function-aspect of intertextual communication.
Thinking of memory as collectively shared, socially shaped, and cognitively organized processes means taking account of the fact that both the contents and the representation of memory are subject to transformation. Process-focused approaches to memory aim at leaving behind old-fashioned concepts that bind memory to territorial and clear-cut social categories. For this purpose, Astrid Erll (2011) provides the metaphor of traveling: “‘Travel’ is therefore an expression of the principal logic of memory: its genesis and existence through movement” (p. 12).
Against the backdrop of this new perspective within the field of memory studies, the character of the insights to be gained also changes. Instead of describing stable, consistent pictures of specific cultural or national collectives and their memorial contents and practices, memory scholars are challenged to comprehend the structures of memory transformation. These structures are not easy to capture since they are essentially defined by movement. The theorists’ preference for spatial metaphors—like Erll’s “traveling memory” or—as we will see—Renate Lachmann’s “space between texts”—illustrates this difficulty. When it comes to literary memory studies, we are faced with problems arising from the fact that the research objects—literary texts—usually represent specific versions or states of mnemonic contents. The transformations these contents have gone through before they crystallized in the texts, are mostly invisible. To uncover these processes, we must widen our view by including the textual and content-related sources of the mnemonic contents and by focusing on the relation between previous and subsequent texts. Moreover, by highlighting the transformative relations between texts, the specific relationship between literature and memory becomes clear. To trace the course of memories through a series of individual texts is to identify writing as doing memory rather than as staging memory. And at the recipient level, reading also becomes a medium of “doing memory,” because it is reading that concretizes the written memories.
Based on these considerations, I suggest that intertextual analysis promises to be a useful tool for analyzing memory transformations within literature. Erll (2011) brings up two terms in order to characterize the traveling of memory processes: “Remediation” designates that mnemonic contents travel “through media history: from orality to writing to print, film and the Internet” (p. 12) and are shaped by the preceding “versions” of the specific content. However, “premediation” denotes the way in which narrative patterns that are passed on and shaped by memory discourses “predetermine the ways in which we experience and interpret reality” (Erll, 2011: 14)—and thus represent it in literature and other discourses. Whereas Erll (2007) uses these terms for transmedia analysis, they can also shed light on memory transformation processes between literary texts (cf. p. 31). Thus, the structure of remediation and premediation can easily be interlinked with that of intertextuality, as Lachmann puts it. By intertextual references to previous texts in subsequent texts, the former is commemorated through the latter (i.e. remediated) and in this way extended, opposed, or reshaped (cf. Lachmann, 1997: 37), whereby new frameworks for premediation arise (cf. Lachmann, 1997: 37). Intertextual structures therefore correspond to the character of process-focused concepts such as Erll’s, who defines memory processes “as the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders” (Erll, 2011: 11). That is how they simultaneously do memory and work on its future. As for literature, by focusing on its intertexts, we can understand how memory is informed by the past and also lays the foundation for future memory.
Therefore, the aim of this article is to foreground and examine the processual character of memory and to render the transformative notion of memory fruitful for literary studies by interlinking process-focused concepts of memory with the analysis of intertextuality. The concept of intertextuality to which I refer represents a middle position in a seemingly eternal field of theory. On one hand, I define intertextuality as a relation between specific texts, where we can distinguish between previous and subsequent ones. This is different from a broad usage of the term. On the other hand, as I include implicit forms of intertextuality, it will be presented as a useful tool for interpretation rather than as a method for proofing an author’s intentions, as theories that use quite narrow concepts of intertextuality suggest. I will elaborate on this position in the first section of this article by outlining the research discussion. Doing so, we will gain parts of a theoretical apparatus that might be useful to analyze transformative memory structures in literature by focusing on its intertextuality.
Process-focused concepts take account of the transformative character of memory as stated earlier. In order to test intertextuality as a tool for literary memory studies, I will first bring two different types of transformation into focus. The first type is the transgenerational travel of memory that Marianne Hirsch named postmemory. The second is what she calls affiliative postmemory. The third concept, developed by Tom Vanassche and me (Henke and Vanassche 2020), is called co-memoration and contains a play on words in which the “co-” in commemoration is interpreted as a prefix. The term thus indicates the coexistence of divergent or at least diverse mnemonic contents from different collectives or individuals of memory. Co-memoration occurs when certain practices and forms of memory travel from one memorial context to another by simultaneously co-remembering the previous one. Before turning to the discussion of the types of transformative memory and presenting some case studies, I would first like to specify the concept of intertextuality to which my argument refers, thereby clarifying the theoretical basis for the purposes of this article.
Memory and the analysis of intertextuality
The field of intertextuality studies is unwieldly and encompasses various approaches. The most general distinction we can make is between broad and narrow concepts. The broad understanding of intertextuality is associated with poststructuralist text theory and expresses the basic feature of texts, that is, being embedded in a system of cultural semiotics and thus being influenced by an uncountable number of former texts. This way, all texts are interlinked in an infinite and universal referential macro-network. Here, “texts” does not mean just graphemically represented syntactic units, but also includes other semiotic systems such as culture, society and history in a pantextual manner (cf. Kristeva, 1986: 36). Both aspects condense in Jacques Derrida’s (1997) famous dictum: “There is nothing outside of the text” (p. 158).
The poststructuralist approach reveals a theory of text through the lens of the cultural function of textuality, as well as a theory of culture through the lens of text linguistics, but it seems less suitable for the praxis of literary analysis. In order to put the axe in the helve, Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister limit the term “text” and posit a narrow concept of intertextuality by defining it as a specific relation between concrete texts. Accordingly, intertextuality occurs as a definable reference within one literary text to another, pre-existing one—the “Prätext” (Engl. “pre-text”; Pfister, 1985: 11). Broich and Pfister go so far as to claim that only those references that are unquestionably intended by the author and, moreover, are intended to be certainly recognized by the reader, are to be called “intertextual” (cf. Broich, 1985: 31). In this perspective, literary analysis is based less on a textual embedding into various texts and discourses than on a completely explicit (and one-sided) act of communication between the production side and the reception side. First, this is a situation that is rarely presumed in literary studies. Second, this idea diminishes the role of the reader as a link in the chain—or rather in the network—of the traveling of memory, whose “involvement coincides with meaning production” (Iser, 1990: xi), as Wolfgang Iser puts it.
We can conclude that broad and narrow understandings of intertextuality are not contradictory. While the former abstractly describe textuality as such, the latter offers a hermeneutic method for concrete literary studies. In order to establish a tool for analyzing the traveling of memory through the medium of literature, I propose a definition that lies between those concepts. For the purpose of an analytical method, intertextuality studies must focus on specific texts and the concrete relation between them. For usefulness, we need to extend Broich’s intention-oriented notion and understand an intertextual reference as definable in the sense of plausible and arguable, 1 but not necessarily in the sense of unquestionably communicated or intended. That means that scholars have to lay bare the texts’ references to other texts, but they do not have to ask about the authors’ conscious purposes.
As mentioned in the beginning, the idea of intertextuality offers a model for how memory travels in literature. Accordingly, Renate Lachmann, who prominently examines the relationship between remembrance literature and intertextuality in her monograph Memory and Literature, transfers the following description of the intertextual character of all texts to memory processes in literature:
the original idea of making literature means first of all making literature from literature, that is, writing as continuation, writing as rejoinder, or rewriting. This notion of making literature out of literature has important implications both for the discreteness of any individual text and for its closure and “totality.” (Lachmann, 1997: 37)
Following this idea, doing memory, is making from memory. As the quotation shows, Lachmann stands for a notion of texts and their meanings being fluid phenomena and open to all sides. Correspondingly, her concept of intertextuality includes the idea of transformation (cf. Lachmann, 1984: 134sq.).
Lachmann’s theory reveals methodically useful categories that fit the cornerstones of intertextuality analysis set above. Those are the “manifest text” (Lachmann, 1997: 31), meaning the specific object to examine, the “referent text” (p. 31)—that is to say “the text referred to” (p. 31) or the “pre-text” in Broich’s and Pfister’s terminology—and the “reference signal” (cf. Lachmann, 1997: 31) that induces the definability I brought up above. The fourth category is “intertextuality” and this is how culture, memory, and memory transformation come into play. According to Lachmann, the “intertext” is a space between an infinite number of eternal texts, where culture and the constitution of meaning happen. Following the logic of her spatial metaphor, she locates memory as well as memory transformation in that space:
Is not the space between texts, in fact, the authentic space of memory? Does not every text also alter that memory space, by altering the architecture in which it inscribes itself? [. . .] The space of memory is inscribed in a text in the same way that a text inscribes itself in a memory space. The memory of a text is its intertextuality. (Lachmann, 1997: 15)
In Lachmann’s terminology, “intertextuality” is double-coded, since it designates the phenomenon as well as a specific feature of the phenomenon; the space between the manifest text and the reference text. In order to untangle the terminology, I propose to call this “space” or rather relation intertextual communication. According to Lachmann (1997), intertextual communication affects the previous as well as the manifest text (cf. p. 63).
The sticking point of Lachmann’s theory, when it comes to distilling a methodology from it, is its linkage with poststructuralist text theory and the notion of a universal intertextual macro-network that connects all texts and even all of reality. The idea of texts having an absolutely open character and fluid meanings that are constantly metamorphosing through their interconnectedness within the universe of textuality leads to a hindering overload of the theory’s central idea, that is, the implicit text, located between the texts, as the space of memory and its transformation. Consequently, Lachmann herself finds that among all those complex procedures that influence the “implicit text” of a text (meaning the amount of its intertextual communication units (cf. Lachmann, 1997: 34)), it is only intertextual references—both the manifest and the latent—that are analyzable. In fact, other elements such as the “implied or presupposed meaning, that is, the subtext; [. . .] (the) tentative or provisional implications, that is, pre-textuality (this is actually subtextuality reserved for the future); and [. . .] the ability to go beyond its own limits, that is, transtextuality” (Lachmann, 1997: 34), which all dominantly shape the space of memory, withstand literary analysis.
Nevertheless, I posit that Lachmann’s theory holds a methodological treasure for the study of literary memory. In order to develop an analytical instrument for studying the interconnection between a process-focused idea of memory and intertextuality on the basis of her work, I propose to pragmatically simplify some aspects and to combine her thoughts with narrower concepts of text and intertextuality. First, as aforementioned, it seems necessary to consider texts as singular, “closed,” and materialized syntactical units. The objects of literary analysis are concrete texts as they are. Lachmann does so in her case studies anyway, but it might be helpful to clarify this point, since I suggest that we could re-relate it to her concept of the “implicit text.” Focusing on concrete texts and precisely relating them with their pre-texts, might allow us to include the categories “subtext” as well as the “subtextuality reserved for the future” at least selectively, since, as I understand it, this is the remediative quality of texts on one hand and the premediative potential of literature on the other hand. 2
As a second step, I propose to simplify Lachmann’s concept of the “implicit text” by sidelining the not necessarily false but still bulky ideas about the fluidity of meaning within the same text and of a macro-(inter-)textual universe. Doing so, the memory space between the texts can be identified with analyzable transformative processes in which features such as mnemonic media, patterns, and contents travel from one (con)text to another. In this sense, the implicit text is the occurrence of memory transformation understood as the communicative act between texts. Intertextual analysis, thus, can work out the dynamics of the similarities and the differences between the literary representations and the commemorative contexts in which they are embedded, in order to examine those processes in particular. Within this framework, the following questions might be useful: what exactly is the hinge between the pre-text and the manifest text concerning their shared features of mnemonic utterance? What functions do the patterns, contents, and plot structures, referred to in the manifest text, assume in their new context? Which of the features that are explicitly, implicitly, or metonymically 3 adopted by the new text are reshaped, transfigured, erased, or left untouched? As we will see, these questions pertain to the characteristic purpose or quaestio, which each of the types of memory transformation involve—a category, I propose to call meta-content. Conversely, since the manifest text adds a paratextual structure to the referent text, we might ask for the retroactively valuative, reviewing, or simply highlighting effects of intertextuality on the previous text and the mnemonic context to which it refers.
Traveling memory I: intertextuality and transgenerational postmemory
The often-cited concept of postmemory developed by Marianne Hirsch (1997) is defined as a form of secondary memory that expresses the “relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before” (Hirsch, 2012: 5). More precisely, Hirsch distinguishes postmemory “from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” (Hirsch, 1997: 22). In her monograph from 2012, The Generation of Postmemory, Hirsch widens her concept by adding a different outline to her idea and addressing affiliative structures of memory inbetween groups that goes beyond familial relationships. Henceforth, she distinguishes between familial and affiliative postmemory respectively between generational and “affiliative structures of transmission” (Hirsch, 1997: 23). I will come back to this second dimension in the next section and will first focus on familial shaped postmemory.
To highlight the processual character of the concept in its transgenerational sense, the development of postmemorial contents can be seen as the adoption and transformation of witnesses’ memories through the descendants’ perspective. But postmemorial transformation faces a twofold difficulty related to the extreme nature of traumatic events. Alice Balestrino and Paolo Simonetti express this problem with regard to the Second World War:
The inability to cope with traumas for those who participated in the war is reflected in their linguistic inability to provide a significant representation to unrelatable experiences; on the other hand, our inability to directly access an event such as WWII leads to an increasing gap between the generation who witnessed the war and the so-called “generation of postmemory.” (Balestrino and Simonetti, 2020: 17)
According to that, it appears that members of the memory generation are able to derive their involvement in history from personal experiences, while those of the postmemory generation lack experience yet are also identically involved. Literature opens up the possibility of literally processing mnemonic contents, thereby filling that gap. As postmemorial representations refer to, occupy, and transform the narratives of previous generations’ experiences in a postmemorial manner, they include a narration of descendants’ identity and position in history. Intertextual analysis might help to work out these processes. What we can anticipate from the intertextuality through which literary postmemory is expressed is the manifestation of transgenerational memory traveling that reflects the difficult communication between generations with completely different horizons of experience regarding a unifying event or subject (i.e. the certain mnemonic content). The specific meta-content of the intertextual communication can be defined as the transformative appropriation of identity-related experiences of the previous generation.
To illustrate how intertextuality works in postmemorial narration, I would like to discuss Christoph Ransmayr’s novel Morbus Kitahara (1995), translated as The Dog King (1998). The novel is about the regressing civilization and society of a mountain village called “Moor” in a counterfactual historical scenery after the Second World War. Moor is located right next to a quarry and a lake called “Blind Shore.” This area was used as a concentration camp during the war. The real-world model of “Blind Shore” is the stone quarry of Ebensee, which is a former satellite camp of Mauthausen. The plot of the novel is based on the idea of what would have happened if there had been no Marshall Plan and thus no reconstruction of postwar Germany, but instead a plan of revenge condemning the perpetrators to return to preindustrial times. The residents of Moor and the surrounding villages are compelled by the occupying power to perform regular penitential rituals, while simultaneously enduring the dismantling of local industry and infrastructure. There are three main protagonists in the novel. Two of whom are central for the following analysis. The first one is Bering, the son of the local blacksmith, who is a war veteran. Bering represents the generation of the perpetrators’ descendants, that is, the generation of postmemory. The second one is Ambras, who is a survivor of the concentration camp. The representation of the characters’ specific experiences each contains intertextual references to corresponding pre-texts. As I explore in the following, a comparison of these references sheds some light on the operations of intertextuality pertaining to literary postmemory. Before I get to that, the third protagonist should be mentioned for the sake of completeness. Just as Bering Lily belongs to the generation of the perpetrators’ descendants. She is the daughter of an alleged war criminal; her father, presumably a concentration camp guard during the war, went missing when a group of victims sought retribution amid the chaotic times following the war. Lily herself is involved in black-market activities, conducting transactions with both soldiers of the occupying forces and the local population. Perpetration in the narrower sense has tended to be avoided as a topic in German-language literature. This observation is interesting in that the character Lily and her family in contrast to the other two protagonists does not have any intertextual pre-text shining through.
Bering’s father, on the contrary, represents a typical and prominent postwar figure in German literature of the postwar years, that is, the “Heimkehrer” or homecoming veteran. Most famously, Wolfgang Borchert (1952) erected a literary monument for this type in his drama Draußen vor der Tür (1947), translated as The man outside. The drama is introduced by a foreword, stating,
He’s been away for a long time, this man. A very long time. Perhaps too long. And he returns quite different from what he was when he went away. Outwardly he is a near relation of those figures which stand in fields to scare birds—and sometimes in the evening, people too. Inwardly—the same. He has waited outside in the cold for a thousand days. And as entrance fee he’s paid with his knee-cap. And after waiting outside in the cold for a thousand nights, he actually—finally—comes home. [. . .] One of the many who comes home—and then don’t come home, because there’s no home there for them anymore. And their home is outside the door. (p. 78)
4
This passage lists the stereotypical characteristics of the “Heimkehrer”: the visible affectedness and traumatization by the experience of a war that felt like an eternity; the physical injury; the incapacity to settle down in their former homes and families; and the impression of being just “one of the many,” belonging to a gray mass of broken depersonalized individuals. All those features are used for the characterization of Bering’s father in Ransmayr’s novel as well. Here, the blacksmith comes back to the mountain village, after he had been “lost inside it [i.e., the war] for so long”; and he comes back as a “thin man” with a “scar on his forehead” (Ransmayr, 1998b: 19). He arrives among “several figures [. . .], gray against gray, not mingling with the waiting crowd” (Ransmayr, 1998b: 18). The keywords are obvious here and validate Erll’s assessment that every representation of decisive events refers much more to existing representations of similar events than to the events themselves (cf. Erll, 2007: 29). Early representations in literary texts—here the exemplary scenery of postwar homecoming in The man outside—lay the groundwork of how we remember and speak of the mnemonic events in question. They thus define the arsenal of images and wording for subsequent representations.
However, in contrast to the pre-text, the central scene of homecoming in Ransmayr’s novel contains a change of perspective. The arrival of Bering’s father is notably depicted from the son’s perspective and experience:
His sons are afraid. The brother claims no longer to remember that man there, and Bering has never seen him before now. [. . .] So they stare at one another, the sons at the terrible stranger, the stranger at the mother, at the brother, at Bering. Each is silent. And then the stranger does something that makes Bering gape his mouth wide for a cry of terror. The thin man points at him, is beside him in two long strides, reaches for him with both hands, lifts him away from his mother, lifts him up to himself. [. . .] And before him now he sees the scar on the blacksmith’s forehead, the wound that has surely made that man there so thin and makes him gasp for breath; and at eye level now with his father he cries for help [. . .]. (Ransmayr, 1998b: 19)
5
The encounter with the father turns the experience of an established mnemonic content that is part and parcel of the (literary) arsenal of postwar commemoration, from the homecomers to their children. In Borchert’s works and other narratives depicting homecoming during the postwar period, the children of returning soldiers—often born while the latter fought on the war front—are portrayed as strange or unfamiliar, or even dead beings. 6 In the cited passage from Ransmayr’s novel, this perspective shifts, and the father becomes the alien subject. The accompanying expression of disgust includes an accusation of the generation before as well as it conveys the idea of transgenerational trauma. In this change of perspective, and by providing a voice to the descendants, lies the transgenerational shift that Hirsch describes as “postmemory,” and intertextuality helps reveal it.
By juxtaposing this postmemorial intertextual transformation with the text’s treatment of the pre-textual source for the character of Ambras, we can gain insight into the identifying function inherent in the appropriation of memories. In the following passage, Ambras tells Bering about the torture he has endured in the concentration camp:
They twist your arms behind your back and tie them with a rope, and, like most of those before you and most of those after you, you are in such anguish you start swinging—and you, you scream and try with all your strength and for God’s sake to hold yourself in some sort of slanted position, so that for God’s sake it won’t happen. But it happens—your own body weight steadily pulls your bound arms higher and higher, until you have no more strength and your own terrible weight yanks your arms up behind your head and rips the ball joints of your shoulders out of their sockets. (Ransmayr, 1998b: 140)
7
The autobiographical report of Jean Améry in his essay Torture (original Die Tortur (1966)) discloses the pre-textual source of this passage. Améry, a Jewish member of the resistance movement in Belgium, was arrested in 1943. In the following quotation, he expresses his own experiences as a prisoner in the Gestapo camp Fort Breendonk in Belgium:
The hook gripped into the shackle that held my hands together behind my back. Then I was raised with the chain until I hung about a meter over the floor. In such a position, or rather, when hanging this way, with your hands behind your back, for a short time you can hold a half-oblique through muscular force. [. . .] And now there was a crackling and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten until this hour. The balls spring from their sockets. My own body weight caused luxation; I fell into a void and now hung by my dislocated arms, which had been torn high from behind and were now twisted over my head. (Améry, 1980: 32)
8
In other articles, I interpreted the novel’s relation to Améry and his work in detail (cf. Henke, 2018, 2020a). It is important to stress the originality of the reference. The novel’s text refers to the mnemonic representation of the real witness and victim of torture, Améry, by using both direct speech (belonging to a fictive victim) and nearby the pre-text’s exact wording. The novel avoids illegitimate appropriation by still commemorating and passing on an exemplary story of a Holocaust victim. On the contrary, as we have seen above, the pre-text that is used for telling Bering’s story is being rewritten and thus transformed in the proper meaning of the word. The different degrees of appropriation to which the manifest text of Morbus Kitahara subjects its pre-texts point to the specific postmemorial identity group to which the author belongs: the perpetrators’ descendants. Whereas the victim’s pre-text remains nearly untouched as it gets incorporated into the novel, the pre-text of the perpetrator becomes an object of transgenerational travel, transformative appropriation, and an identity-related claim. Hence, the author locates his own position in history and (post)memory. We can conclude that intertextuality offers the opportunity to engage with previous literary representations in various ways, aiming to establish a specific relationship with historical events of “deep personal connection” (Hirsch, 1997: 22)—a relationship that is closely tied to generational affiliation. 9
Traveling memory II: intertextuality and affiliative postmemory
Since affiliation can be filled in different manner, I first define it for our purposes with the specific goal of obtaining distinct clarification regarding the following three types of transformative memory—transgenerational postmemory, affiliative postmemory, and co-memoration. Whereas the idea of transgenerational postmemory highlights the familial connection, affiliative postmemory refers to “an identification, an affiliation with a transmitted memory without the familial tie, but with a larger collective” (Romera-Figueroa, 2020: 207). In contrast to co-memoration, which involves the transmission of memory between different contents and entities, as we will see below, affiliation pertains to the travel of memory within groups—from members that share personal or familial experiences of specific events to those, who do not. 10 While Hirsch does not provide a detailed definition of the second form of postmemory, it is apparent that immigrants can be considered as individuals within a society whose connection to this collective can be facilitated through affiliative postmemory. Individual experience of immigration, in this context, is associated with establishing an affiliative postmemorial relationship with the mnemonic framework of the immigrant society.
The novel Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum by Emine Sevgi Özdamar (2021) serves as a fitting example of a migration narrative that incorporates elements of affiliative postmemory through intertextuality. The novel tells the story of a stage actress who flees from Istanbul to Europe after the military coup in Turkey in 1971 and tries to build a life as an artist in theaters in France and Germany. The text is interspersed with explicit intertextual references to various plays and other literary works that have a dual function. On one hand, the novel’s intertextual panorama illustrates the European theater culture and scene of the 1970s; on the other hand, the intertextual discourse shows how the first-person narrator moves in foreign countries and tries to establish a relationship with the cultural heritage of Europe and to find her place within it. The majority of the pre-texts referred in the novel focus either on European, particularly German, history—for example, Sebastian Haffner’s autobiographical book Geschichte eines Deutschen. Die Erinnerungen 1914–1933 (cf. Özdamar, 2021: 736); or on national or cultural identity, as seen in Bertolt Brecht’s oeuvre (cf. Özdamar, 2021: 575–578) or Heinrich Heine’s Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (cf. Özdamar, 2021: 697). These pre-texts serve as a framework of memory for the narrator, enabling her to connect with the collective memory of the society she immigrates to. It is literature that provides a projection network for an immigrant narration. The meta-content expressed through this intertextual communication involves the transformative appropriation of identity-related discourses by an immigrating individual, aiming to anchor in a collective memory space. In this context, the individual affiliation story serves as a pars pro toto, indicating the mnemonic structure of post-migrant societies characterized by continually evolving memories and narratives. This meaning becomes particularly clear in the following passage from the novel. In it, the narrator reflects on her migration as a change of affiliation:
Ich liebte es, in einem Land zu leben, das lebensfähig war. Ich hatte ja kein lebensfähiges Land. Deswegen wohnte ich jetzt in deutschen Schriftstellern, Wo wohnen Sie, Madame? In Franz Xaver Kroetz In Herbert Achternbusch In Rainer Werner Fassbinder In Heinrich Böll In Wolfgang Neuss In Rosa von Praunheim In Thomas Brasch In Hannah Arendt Danke dir, Mond über Deutschland, dass du all diesen Menschen deine Lichter gabst. (Özdamar, 2021: 491) (Engl.: I loved to live in a viable country. Indeed, I didn’t have a viable country. Therefore I now lived inside German authors. Where do you live, Madam? In [. . .] Thank you, moon above Germany, for giving your lights to all of them.)
In their work, all these listed authors deal—more or less radically—with the central event in Germany’s collective memory, Nazi history. The metaphorical image of a stage actress who resides within authors conveys an extremely affirmative mode of identification in its literal sense. In another passage, the technique of intertextual transmission of literature, or mnemonic contents, from original members of a society to new ones is emphasized by metanarrative reflection. The narrator recounts a theatrical performance featuring a nude actress. Among the audience is an Arab man accompanied by his four wives. The women leave the auditorium when the actress disrobes but return after the scene concludes. The narrator reflects on this incident, stating, “Ich liebte es, wenn zwischen der Bühne und dem Zuschauerraum etwas passierte. Das Theater findet nicht auf der Bühne statt, sondern zwischen der Bühne und dem Zuschauerraum” (Özdamar, 2021: 490; Engl.: “I loved it when something happened between the stage and the audience. Theatre doesn’t take place on the stage but between the stage and the audience”).
In the citation, it emphasizes the role of the viewer or reader, while expressing that the meaning of texts and intertextual cultural travel arises in a “space between” (texts, writers, readers, viewers, etc.). Furthermore, in addition to affirmation, the passage introduces the experience of cultural alienation as an element of affiliative postmemory.
The final chapter of the novel offers a relativization of the narrator’s affirmative side of affiliative appropriation, while at the same time offering a glimpse into the present. From her writing desk on a Turkish island in the Aegean, the narrator looks out over a refugee camp of tents. A crow carries down a sheet of paper from her typewriter, on which the narrator has typed an aphorism from Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951; Engl.: Minima Moralia. Reflections from the Damaged Life; cf. Özdamar, 2021: 749f.). These are the words cited:
Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, damaged, and if one does not wish to be taught a cruel lesson behind the airtight doors of one’s self-esteem, would do well to recognize this. [. . .] One’s language has been expropriated and the historical taproot from which one derived their powers of cognition has been taken away. (Adorno, 2005: part 1, no. 13)
This intertextual reference has a double direction of memory travel and thus carries a double communicative meaning. On one hand, the narrator’s affiliation with the German culture of remembrance is continued by completing the set of pre-texts with Adorno as a central thinker on the consequences of German Nazi history. On the other hand, the expression of the specific mnemonic content addressed by Adorno—his own escape from Nazi Germany and subsequent emigration to the United States in 1934—or rather, his analysis of emigration drawn from this personal experience, “travels” to another context. In this new context, concerning the narrator’s own escape and immigration, the intertextual reference serves as a model of memory narrative. Furthermore, the infinite dynamics of remediation and premediation shines through as the exploration of the repercussions of emigration intertwines with the observation of the refugee camp outside, where the narrator witnesses young refugees from North Africa en route to Europe. The memory and narrative of migration are thus conveyed through intertextuality, relating three different mnemonic contents: Adorno’s escape from the Nazis in the 1930s, the protagonist’s flight caused by the military coup in the Turkey in the 1970s, and the large-scale refugee movement from Middle East and North Africa to Europe in the 2010s. Since this second case is considered to be a “co-memory,” I now come to the third and final type of the transformative memory.
Traveling memory III: intertextuality and co-memoration
The term “co-memoration” is derived from a play on the word “commemoration” in the sense of “remembrance.” By interpreting the “co-” as a prefix, it refers to the coexistence of divergent or at least disparate, memorial contents of different groups or individuals of memory (cf. Henke, 2020b: 14). The concept is an attempt to combine Michael Rothberg’s (2009) much-discussed term “multidirectional memory” with analytical and narratological concepts, thus expanding it from the designation of an individual phenomenon to a category of analysis. Co-memoration labels a paradigm of thought that includes all approaches that intend to acknowledge these differences by engaging them in dialogue, appreciation, and solidarity free from competition and exclusion. Co-memorating means relating different mnemonic contents, for example, two genocidal events, through figures of exchange like comparison, entanglement, transfer, or dialogue. Comparison involves delineating commonalities and differences among disparate mnemonic contents. Entanglement points to the historic nexus and structural parallels among various traumatic events. Transfer encompasses the borrowing of the language, the narrative patterns (like the structures and elements of established plots) and the memory media from a specific commemorative context to another. Dialogue, self-evidently, denotes the exchange between individuals and groups of different identities, experiences, perspectives, or traditions. The specificity of the concept lies in the prefix “co-,” which accentuates the relationship between the memorial contents brought together. Continuing from this, the subsequent content commemorates the previous one through the manifest text, rather than merely using the latter as a benchmark. Because of its ability to relate various different fields and levels and to confront them in intertextual communication, literature is very well suited for co-memorative representation.
The travel of memory within the framework of co-memory happens between the memorial funds of different groups and on the narratives that build their collective identity. One of the opportunities for literature to co-memorate is to refer intertextually to other literary representations of relatable historical events. The conceptual meta-content of the intertextual communication in this case might be solidarity, attentiveness, or empowerment. An illustrating example for co-memoration through intertextual transfer is the novel Die Sommer by the German author Ronya Othmann (2020).
The novel is about the genocide of the Yazidi in Sinjar (Iraq) and the surrounding area in August 2014 by the terrorist organization Islamic State. The protagonist Leyla grows up in Germany with a German mother and a Yazidi father. The first part of the novel sees her spending every summer vacation of her childhood in Kurdistan with her relatives. Thus, Leyla’s intercultural identity is in the foreground of the narration from the beginning. In the second part of the novel, Leyla commences her studies in Leipzig, where she undergoes what appears to be a typical student life and meets her first love. Simultaneously, she pursues the escalating civil war in Syria and Iraq, along with the threat it poses to her family, from a distance—through television and through telephone conversations with her relatives. Leyla is torn between caring for her relatives and the excitement of early adulthood. The reality surrounding her gradually acquires an increasingly surreal quality, as perceived from Leyla’s perspective.
Othmann has been the first to deal with the event of the genocide of the Yazidi in German literature. And she chooses an intertextual reference to a famous Holocaust poem as a motif for her novel: Paul Celan’s Todesfuge (1948, Engl. “Deathfugue”; Celan 1986 ). In German, “Fuge” is a homonym. In the title of Celan’s poem, “Fuge” refers to its literary form which is inspired by the fugue as a musical composition principle. In Othmann’s novel “Fuge” is used in the sense of small gaps between floor tiles and stone slabs in public places. The motif is used in the following three ways: First, it is introduced as a well-known child’s play in the first part of the book. In an iteratively represented plot element, Leyla jumps from tile to tile in airport halls during the family’s travels to Kurdistan every summer. The aim is not to step on the gaps: “Wer die Fugen berührte, war tot [. . .]” (Othmann, 2020: 15; Engl.: “Whoever touches the tile gaps is dead [. . .]”). While the girl is playing her game, her father bribes several intelligence officials to ensure that Leyla and her parents can continue their journey (cf. Othmann, 2020: 14sq.). In this manner, the risk of death represented by the gaps in the child’s play is symbolically connected to the peril faced by the Kurds—especially the Yazidis—in Leyla’s father’s politically unstable home region.
Relating to this first variation, the second variation of the motif concerns the map of Kurdistan. The land of the Kurds is not a unified, politically recognized nation and, being a region of conflict, overlaps with parts of Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. As such—anticipating the symbolic language of the novel—Kurdistan delineates Fugen between recognized and unrecognized borders on the map—encompassing overlapping border zones that, at times, transform into death zones (“Todesfugen”) for the Kurdish minorities.
The third function of the motif “Todesfuge” is found in the second part of the novel, which is set in the year 2014. The stone slabs in front of the university library in Leipzig remind Leyla of both the game she played as a child and that at the current time her relatives in Kurdistan are in mortal danger, because IS fighters are massacring the Yazidi: “In den Fugen sitzt der Tod, dachte Leyla” (Othmann, 2020: 226; Engl.: “Death is sitting in between the tile gaps, Leyla thought”). This indicates that a location, which is part of her life as a German student, acts as a trigger for her suffering as a member of the Yazidi people. Therefore, the motif of the “Fuge” functions as a hinge of Leyla’s multi-layered identity, which is a central topic of the novel. By choosing one of the most prominent texts related to the Holocaust and incorporating its significant titular term as a motif, the point of reference itself—the National Socialists’ genocide against the Jews—is implicitly commemorated as well. The biographical connection between Leyla’s German socialization, which includes the cultural remembrance of the Holocaust and an established literary discourse of Holocaust representation, and the Yazidi background of her father’s side, helps to find a co-memorative language for the genocidal atrocities. 11 As such, the novel transfers a collective knowledge of history to current genocidal events. Intertextuality not only aids in narrating traumatic events here, but it also associates the problem of persecuted minorities without a recognized state with a similar case in history. The subtext might be just as the creation of the State of Israel was deemed necessary in response to the Holocaust, a similar argument might lead to the conclusion that the creation of an independent Kurdish state is also necessary. The co-memorative figures are transfers in the service of attention and comparison, delivering an implicit political demand in this case. 12
Intertextual analysis as a tool
In her essay “Travelling memory,” Astrid Erll proclaims a “third phase” of memory studies. After “a first phase of research in cultural memory, which took place in the early twentieth century” (Erll, 2011: 4) and a second phase that was characterized by the discovery of the connection between memory and nation (cf. Erll, 2011), Erll’s vision of the third phase focuses on “the insight that memory fundamentally means movement: traffic between individual and collective levels of remembering circulation among social, medial, and semantic dimensions” (Erll, 2011: 15). For literary memory studies, this perspective demands finding tools that help to discover, analyze, and frame those movements. For this purpose, I hopefully have shed some light on the nexus between intertextuality and specific types of memory travels in literature. The categories I discussed earlier are summarized in the following table.
At first glance, the mnemonic function of intertextuality might be perceived as the presence of one text within another. The manifest text commemorates the contents of the pre-text through references, thereby maintaining the remembrance of those contents. But even more promising for memory studies is the concept of intertextual communication, occurring between texts. In analogy to this phenomenon, the communication between (manifest) texts and the reader is also worth considering. By this means, intertextuality analysis can help to work out how writing and reading literature does memory. Intertextuality and literature in general, therefore, do not only function as passive repositories but also as transformative instruments for generating new perspectives, narratives, and identities of memory. In this way, memory literature acquires an epistemic quality.
