“Unsere mutigen Feiglinge”

Sukare (1957-), focuses on the eponymous grandson of a Wehrmacht deserter, and his quest for his grandfather's story to be rehabilitated in the village from where he originated. The narrator's attempts to counter the falsification of his grandfather's and great-grandmother's history, who were persecuted at the hands of the Nazi regime, come in the wake of the rehabilitation of Wehrmacht deserters in Austria at the national level in 2009, which is explicitly thematised in the narrative. Ultimately, while Schwedenreiter underlines the significance of developments in memory culture at the central level, there is implicit criticism of the extent to which this official cultural memory of the deserters is able to impact memory practices at the local level, in the communities from which these deserters actually came, where, as Sukare's novel illustrates, their legacy remains severely contested. Instead, in what Sukare terms a Heimatroman, we persist, despite the ostensible line in the sand of official rehabilitation. Moreover, as will be shown, the reception of Sukare's novel mirrors the vicissitudes of the "memory contests" described in Schwedenreiter

Archaeology · Art · German · Literature · Memorialization · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

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  Jan Assmann•Cultural memory studies•2008

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  Open Access•Steven Beller•Concise History of Austria•2007

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  Open Access•Maria Fritsche•Gender & History•2012

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