THE NOVELS FLUGHUNDE [MEGABATS] (MARCEL BEYER) AND LICHTSPIEL (DANIEL KEHLMAN) – PATHS THROUGH THE PRESENT TO THE TRAUMA OF THE PAST
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Date
2025
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Plovdiv University Press
Abstract
The article examines two works with similar problems, which – although set in the years of the Second World War, do not belong to the genre of the historical novel, because the different approaches to the questions of memory take them beyond the genre model. In Beyerʼs Flughunde (1995), the lyrically infused narration is directed at a kind of romantic obsession with listening to the voice of everything, at the idea of reaching and capturing unadulterated human voices and sounds, overcoming the prosthetics of the technical. The approach of this novel suggests the presence of deep dimensions of memory and the discovery of unsuspected patterns of memory ordering through the acoustic unconscious. In Kehlmanʼs Lichtspiel (2023) this approach is also present. The reader is invited to search the recesses of memory with the narrator for motives in past behavior and reenactments of decisive moments. But access to the deep dimensions of memory is denied here, and the paths to the past lead to suggestions of the anesthetic power of blind chance.
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Keywords
memory, optically/acoustically unconscious, National Socialism in Germany, fellow traveler, frame narrative