The Obligations of Memory? Gender and Historical Responsibility in Tanja Dückers'sHimmelskörperand Arno Geiger'sEs geht uns gut

Abstract

In this article, I analyze Tanja Dückers'sHimmelskörper(2003) and Arno Geiger'sEs geht uns gut(2005) in the context of questions concerning remembering history and feminist ethics, specifically the development of care ethics from the early 1980s into the present. The purpose of the analysis is to understand what, if anything, gender and reproduction have to do with remembering and the obligations that remembering generates. I argue that the way the authors of these novels explore the connections among gender, historical memory, and responsibility closely resembles certain aspects of the work of feminist scholars on care ethics, who, at the beginning of the discipline, sought to locate in maternal behavior an alternative ethical paradigm to the tradition of Western ethics. Reading the development of feminist ethics together with the way Dückers and Geiger lay out the relationships that each novel's protagonist has with others, I conclude that the obligation to remember arises primarily from the responsibilities to which human relationships give rise, rather than from the specific relationship between mother and child.