Witnessing migrant memories through literature: The case of Nagorno-Karabakh in transnational perspective

Abstract

This comparative essay explores the relationship between memory and migration/integration through the example of two recent literary texts—the German-language novel All Russians Love Birch Trees by Olga Grjasnowa and a story from the Russian-language “novel in voices” Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich—that portray personal memory of ethnic violence in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1990. In Grjasnowa’s novel, the protagonist’s traumatic memories cannot be integrated into German memory culture, despite the fact that she, as a legal immigrant, enjoys the status of political subject. In reversed dynamics, Alexievich’s protagonist, who remains vulnerable on the political and social level, has been able to articulate her trauma in the presence of the empathetic listener—the implied author. Analyzing narrative devices that aim to engage the reader as a respondent to the characters’ suffering during the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1990s and after their arrival in Germany and Russia, this essay identifies a call for a holistic integration of migrants on both the civic level and the level of memory through the medium of secondary witnessing.