This project has received funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the European Union’s Seventh

Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 605728

On the Narrative Trail of Refugees: Refugee Stories in German

Literature and Culture in the 20th and 21st Centuries Dr. Charlton Payne

Literary Studies | University of Erfurt / UC Berkeley

charltonpayne@icloud.com

Literary Corpus Armin T. Wegner, Die Austreibung; Werfel, Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh; B. Traven, Totenschiff; Stefan Zweig, Episode am Genfer See; Roth, Der stumme Prophet and Flucht ohne Ende. Menzel, Flüchtlinge; Remarque Liebe deinen Nächsten, Arc de Triomphe, Die Nacht von Lissabon, Seghers, Transit; Grass, Blechtrommel; Hans Werner Richter, Sie fielen aus Gottes Hand; Arno Schmidt; Treichel, Der Verlorene, Menschenflug, Anatolin; Jirgl, Die Unvollendeten; Grass, Im Krebsgang; Hein, Landnahme; Kempowski, Alles umsonst; Herta Müller, Atemschaukel. Stanišić, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert; Ursula Krechel, Shanghai fern von wo; Sherko Fatah Onkelchen, Das dunkle Schiff

Aims and Objectives •  Describe specific features of narrative fictions about refugee displacement. •  Develop a set of categories and methods for analyzing the literary history of

refugee narratives that is also attuned to changing historical semantics and juridical parameters.

•  Shed light on the historical and narratological aspects of the concepts and master narratives (concerning national histories or even of the rise of an international human rights regime) used to represent refugees over the course of the twentieth century and into the present.

•  Present the results in the form of a scholarly monograph.

Abstract The study closely inspects the specific narratives that have formed around the figure of the refugee over the course of the twentieth century. With a particular focus on literary texts, it analyzes their constitutive elements as well as their cultural functions from the perspective of narrative theory. Refugee narrative fictions transform and undergo thematic shifts that start with the institution of the passport system around WWI, converge and conflict with both "Heimat" and humans rights discourse after WWII, and continue through to narratives of a search for refuge under conditions of global migration and the security controls introduced to administer and police these pathways (including the threat of global terrorism). The project is distinct for analyzing the ways in which narratives seek to make the refugee legible as a figure of political life. At issue are the ways in which these narrations have embarked on the trail of refugees.

Narrative (Storied World)

Methodology The study uses political theory (e.g. Arendt, Benhabib, Agamben) to describe the act of expulsion and displacement as a break from social, normative, political and cultural institutions and narrative theory (e.g. Lotman, Koschorke, Ingold, Herman) to analyze the unique narrativity of refugees with reference to core elements of narrative: •  articulations of narrative voice •  shifting modes of address •  sequencing of causality •  strategies of affect and attention binding •  topological distributions of semantic spaces within literary models of the world.