Autobiography as Participation in the ‘Master Narrative’: GDR Academics after Unification

Abstract

For some time now, the humanities and cultural studies have been preoccupied with the topics of memory, remembering, memory cultures, and forms of collective remembrance. However, this concentration on the discourses of collective memory has been widely criticized, for example by Susan Sontag (2003, pp. 76–7) or Johannes Fried, who has challenged such discourses with his thesis that ‘[o]nly individuals remember, not collectives’ (Fried, 2004, p. 293). Fried encourages us to pay attention to individual memory texts, in order to interrogate them as an historical and literary genre. Furthermore, the great interest that this genre has long enjoyed among the reading public also speaks for such an engagement with ‘individual remembering’: Biography has become the central pillar of the book market; it infiltrates literature and sums up the best that non-fiction books have to offer. It is almost as if the public is possessed by an excessive hunger for written lives, a kind of literary cannibalism. (Raulff, cited in Ullrich, 2007) KeywordsCollective MemoryMemory TextMaster NarrativeBook MarketMemory CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.