Erzählweisen des Vergessens. Ellipsen im Roman von Theodor Fontane bis W. G. Sebald

Abstract

This dissertation, Erzählweisen des Vergessens: Ellipsen im Roman von Theodor Fontane bis W.G. Sebald, examines the interconnections of forgetting and narrative structures in major works of German prose fiction from c. 1870–2001. I understand forgetting as an absence hinting at a hidden presence, a definition that complicates our understanding of meaning-making in texts. Typically, a present sign, for example a word, brings to mind something absent, whereas here, an omission acts as a sign of something present. Engaging with methodologies from cultural memory studies, narratology, and philosophy, I argue that the way forgetting creates meaning is akin to the way an ellipsis works: an omission is marked and subsequently filled by contextual cues. As a critical textual expression of forgetting, the ellipsis produces meaning in a text by illuminating the repressed aspects of cultural memory, the unspeakable, and societal trauma. I demonstrate that elliptical forgetting allows late realist texts by Fontane and Raabe to participate in a veiled antisemitic discourse, rendering “the Jew” the constitutive “Other” of the German nation-state around 1900. I also show how elliptical forgetting conveys the traumatic war experience of the Great War through experimental form, disrupting linear time in Alfred Döblin’s works, and how W. G. Sebald strategically employs forgetting to address both the trauma of the Holocaust and the failures of German memory politics. As yet there has been no such analysis of forgetting as a specific characteristic of narration itself, and this work shows how elliptical forgetting links memory politics and aesthetics, ultimately enabling literature to partake in key discussions of memory politics.