Gender, Genre, and the Evolution of Memory: Insights from Postwar German Literature, 1945-2015

Shows how genre links gender and memory in German "mother books" and contends that recent changes in German memory culture reflect a gendered shift as much as a generational one.


To an extraordinary degree, German literary memoirs and novels published since the Second World War have struggled with remembering the war and its aftermath. In approaching questions of individual, family, and collective memory in literature and German memory culture more broadly, scholars have emphasized the concept of generation. The present study complicates this generational view by examining eight decades of German-language memoirs and novels about World War II-era mothers and grandmothers. As it traces the evolution of these books, it demonstrates their surprising similarity over time and illuminates how genre mediates between gender and memory.

In the German context, the book finds that many features associated with contemporary literary memory are common in "mother books" from the 1950s onward, as well as in genres traditionally coded as female. It thus contends that the change in German memory culture around 2000 can be viewed as a gendered shift as much as a generational one: in the last twenty years, what was once marginalized as women's memory has become central to German memory culture. More generally, the study demonstrates how gendered genres both perpetuate existing complexes of gender and memory and signal-and even contribute to-new constellations of gendered memory. Reading books by authors from Heinrich Böll to Eugen Ruge and Jenny Erpenbeck, it reveals genre as a key mechanism linking gender and memory.

KATRA A. BYRAM is Associate Professor of German at Ohio State University.