Other people's stories: Ethics, identity, and coming to terms with the past, 1871--present

In German-language literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, texts abound in which a first-person narrator tells a story about another person's life, a person whom the narrator casts as protagonist of the tale. Yet in many of these texts, the narrator's palpable presence in both the narrated past and the present of narration unsettles this supposed focus on the protagonist. In fact, it is the narrator alone who links the two temporal realms. In this dissertation, I contend that such texts illustrate an enduring tradition of using narration to attempt to come to terms with a difficult past. In the wake of an historical or personal watershed, their narrators re-interpret the events of their protagonists' lives in an effort to come to terms with their own past identities and with their present selves. Readings of texts by Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe, Gunter Grass, and W.G. Sebald develop this claim.;In examining the way these narrators negotiate the identities of past and present, this study contributes to three distinct but intersecting fields. First, it further develops a narratological understanding of the narrative form, linking its major structural features to thematic concerns those features raise. Second, it intervenes in current discussions of narrative ethics, maintaining that prescriptive rules for engagement with the "other" in literature fail to account for the historical specificities that constrain the possibilities for such ethical engagement. Finally, it locates the post-World War II phenomenon of German Vergangenheitsbewaltigung within a long tradition of narrative efforts to come to terms with difficult pasts. Although the circumstances and scope of postwar Vergangenheitsbewaltigung are extreme, its features and dilemmas resemble a process that is sparked whenever a historical, social, or personal shift leads to a radical change in outlook and a concomitant reassessment of the past.