Literary Production And Transformation Of The Collective Memory Of German Soldiers And Red Guards

One of the main themes of postwar German literature crystallized out of the continued discussion of the fascist past of Germany, which is with critical reflection and literary performance especially admired by the Chinese readers. This paper tries to compare with the cultural-scientific concept of "collective memory" Uwe Timm’s In my brother and Heinrich Boell’s Where were you, Adam? on the memory content level and the narrative level, and furthermore to outline the transformation of the collective memory of German soldiers of post-war generation and war generation. At the same time this paper will use the four narrative models theory of Xu Zidong about literary texts on Cultural Revolution to analyze the literary production of collective memory of the Red Guards in three reflection novels. By comparing the collective memory of the "perpetrators" in the German and Chinese literature, the present study contributes to stimulate the Chinese readers to further reflection on the Cultural Revolution.The memory is socially shaped and group-specific. Literature serves as an excellent storage medium of the collective memory. In the novel Where were you, Adam?, Boell creates a strong visual collage of war, in which especially traumatic experiences of the soldiers and the futility of the war are brought to the presentation. Boell compares the normality of the soldiers with the brutality of the racist and the cruelty of war to criticize the cold war machine. In contrast, Uwe Timm engages with the internal perspective in the family history back to the past. During the reconstruction of his brother picture he finds out that even an SS soldier seems normal, but with partial blindness against the enemy and the civilian population. By criticism of blind obedience and military craze Timm has the responsibility back to individual soldiers.-- In comparison, the Chinese Literature discusses hardly the individual responsibility of the Red Guards. In the model "Stories of Disaster", the Red Guards are portrayed as victims of the Cultural Revolution, who are seduced by the Gang of Four and undergo traumatic experience itself. In the model "Memories of the Cultural Revolution" come crime and shame of the Red Guards to represent, but repentance is not to speak, either because they are reconciled with the persecuted, or they are assigned several roles simultaneously both perpetrator and victim or witness.