This book examines the depiction of childhood and the Nazi German past in post-1989 German literature. Developing a new theory of 'childness', the study analyses how contemporary authors use tropes of childhood in their engagements with Germany's National Socialist past. The book features the work of Sebald, Beyer, Walser and Forte.

Autorentext

Nora Maguire is Assistant Professor in Germanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She completed her PhD in 2011.

Inhalt

Contents: Childness and the discursive landscapes of the ‘new’ Federal Republic - The tabula rasa and the innocent eye in Dieter Forte’s Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen - Childness and the ‘New Right’: Martin Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen - The violence of innocence in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde - ‘Enchanted hunters’: Paedophilic motifs in the work of W.G. Sebald - Innocence, death and Sebald’s structures of mourning - Intimations of mortality: Childhood memory and the child’s perspective in Sebald’s ‘Il ritorno in patria’, ‘Max Aurach’ and Austerlitz - The dream of wholeness: Childness, memory and subjectivity in Austerlitz - Childness and the poetics of persuasion.