Literary Reconstruction Of The Family And State History-Memories Of Eugen Ruge's In Times Of Fading Light

In Times of Fading Light(2011)is a montage novel.In his semi-autobiographical novel Eugen Ruge reflects the history of the GDR on the basis of the fate of a family.The novel won the German Book Prize in 2011 and sold over half a million copies until June 2013.The novel with autobiographical background describes the fate of the Umnitzer family during the forty years in the GDR.This work facilitates different approaches to interpretation by an extensive set of perspectives and themes.Since the publication of the novel,a number of reviews came off the press.The interpretation focused mainly on the history and society of the GDR,for example Susan Schmidt's The GDR in Eugen Ruge's novel In Times of Fading Light.The author analyzes Ruges novel from the socio-historical perspective and examines the social phenomena of the GDR on the basis of the text.The novel In Times of Fading Light was translated into Chinese and published in China,however,so far not much research has been conducted on it.The focus of the analysis is on investigating the literary reconstruction of the GDR.The specific questions are:· What kind of collective memory is represented in the novel?· How is it presented?· How are the image of the GDR and the formation of identity in the GDR set?To illuminate this question I will make use of the memory theory in this article.To analyse the novel,the concepts of memory and the memory theory will be explained first.Then the article will discuss how the author constructs the memories of literary figures based on Erll's theory of memory.Finally,it will be discussed to what extent the memories of the DDR have changed in the German culture of remembrance.In the third chapter,the structure of the novel is examined based on the mimesis of collective memory.This particular type of narration has a significant impact on the presentation of individual and collective memories.The fourth chapter examines some important topics of the novel in terms of memories and special places of memory as well as the repeatedly occurring scene-the grandfather's 90th birthday.The novel as a carrier of collective memory represents an important source of conclusions with regard to the construction of reality and identity.By analysing the dimension of the "what" the following can be stated:1.The novel describes a utopian image of the GDR and the family memory shows a process in which this utopia collapses step by step.2.The memories in the novel also distinguished the conversion form in terms of identity formation.Ruge's novel takes a prominent position in the artistic exploration of the GDR history.The differentiation and multiple perspectives of poetic discourse not only enable various approaches of interpretations to the microcosm of the text,but also require an integration of reading in the macrocosm of the politics of memory and the national understanding of history of the country.