Maestri di Germania. Politiche della memoria nel Novecento tedesco da Warburg a Sebald

Abstract

This contribution aims to provide some case studies of memory strategies, or rather “memory policies” or “memory politics”, as they are applied in German literature after the Second World War. It traces an alternative path that develops the “monstrous” nature of the lessons of the war. If, as Paul Celan famously expressed in Death Fugue from Poppy and Memory, death is a “master from Germany” (ein Meister aus Deutschland), then the task of certain exponents of German self-narrative, such as Celan himself, Christa Wolf and W.G. Sebald, has been to reveal the ambiguities and dynamic characteristics of their own “monstruosity” without becoming immobilised by guilt. These masters are monsters of Germany and, for this very reason, they can produce dialectical images of the past. As Aby Warburg used to say, it is through monsters that one can better bear the weight of memory.