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Abstract Julia Kanchana Schlichting
With his novella Im Krebsgang (2002), Günter Grass staged a specific detail of the National Socialist Regime (the sinking of the refugee ship Gustloff) as a family history, related between three generations, through their memory of events and the reaction to these memories. The grandmother figured as a directly concerned contemporary witness, whilst her son's version of what transpired, reflects above all, his mother's recurring accounts of what happened, whereas the grandson's knowledge of the recent past was gained by the narration of firsthand accounts by his grandmother, as a somewhat problematical contemporary witness. The reader is superficially confronted by a familial generational type in a biologistic sense (grandmother, son and grandson). Attempts at comprehension and claims regarding the truth of each and every generation are the fundamental themes of the poetic-historical dissemination of the problems.
His autobiographical novel Beim Häuten den Zwiebel (2006) shows an omniscient narrator, who realizes the generation problem with flashbacks to his younger days.
In Grass's novella Die Box (2008), he links and complements the immediately antecedent novellas to a specific form of Remembrance Trilogy ("Erinnerungstrilogie") and realizes a possibly typical competent speaker of his generation, which from the narration perspective is certainly varied, quite contrary to Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. Grass lets the eight children of the protagonist talk as eightfold remembrance entities. The rationale of the author being: "Die Erinnerung kämpft mit dem Stolz, mit der Phantasie und am Ende gewinnt doch der Stolz." (The memory struggles with pride and with fantasy but in the long run, pride wins)
The PhD project seeks to find out, in which way the claim of memory and the act of remembering are bound to the contemporary witness and the community of common experience and in how far this is realized in the literature that can be termed "Schreiben gegen die verstreichende Zeit" (writing against the passing of time). It is necessary in this context to appraise the assumption of the term "Erinnerungstrilogie", which is not only limited to the autobiographical writings, but expands to reflections about the processes of memories. At the same time, as a consequence of the author's desire to represent the passing of time, an analysis will be made as to whether his moralisation and also generally accepted allotted pretence to be speaker of his generation as well as warning voice to future generations can be derivated from this.