СПЕЦИФИКА WENDELITERATUR (ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ «ПОВОРОТА») В ОБЪЕДИНЕННОЙ ГЕРМАНИИ

Abstract

When studying the literature of the united Germany, the question arises whether such texts as J. Sparschuh’s “The Room Fountain” (1995), Ch. Wolf’s “What Remains?” (1990), G. Grass’s “Wide Field” (1995), “My Century” (1999), T. Brussig’s “Sun Alley” (1999), L. Seiler’s “Star 111” (2020), and other numerous works reflecting an entire era, can be categorized under the same term. Since the end of the twentieth century, German-language literary scholarship has repeatedly referred to the concepts of ‘Wenderoman’ and ‘Wendeliteratur’ (the novel of the “era of the turn” and the literature of the “turn”) as part of this subject matter. However, so far there is no worldwide practice of using these concepts as literary terms in the study of twentieth-century German fiction. Within the framework of this article, we assume that despite the authors’ belonging to different generations, their experiences of living in the GDR or the FRG, and the heterogeneity of the genres in which they wrote, their novels have much in common and are in need of a unifying terminology. The theoretical part of the article also includes a discussion of whether the word ‘Wende’ can be the carrier of the main ideas of artistic texts, devoted to the search for national identity, and also deals with the history of the political concept of ‘Wende’. Considering the concept of ‘Wendeliteratur’ as a term, we summarize the works of Germanspeaking researchers in this field and make an attempt to derive a general definition and criteria of literature of the “turn”, questioning about what texts and what authors comprise ‘Wendeliteratur’, and according to what principles they can be attributed to it. As a result of a comparative typological analysis of three selected works (the novella “Ribbeck Pears” by F.K. Delius (1991), the novel “The Tower” by U. Telkamp (2008) and the novel “Crusoe” by L. Seiler (2014)), we demonstrate the parallels, linking the key images, the overlapping leitmotifs, similarities in artistic techniques and choice of themes, the particular trends of artistic thinking, typical for the ‘Wendeliteratur’ (literature of the “turn”).