{"id":4527,"date":"2015-06-05T19:37:09","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T23:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/?page_id=4527"},"modified":"2015-06-05T19:37:09","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T23:37:09","slug":"margrit-zinggeler-glossen40-2015","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/archive\/most-recent-issue-glossen-402015\/margrit-zinggeler-glossen40-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Margrit Zinggeler"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cEastern European Memory\u201d in Contemporary German Swiss Literature<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Abstract<\/p>\n

The culmination of the \u201cEastern Turn\u201d in German Literature is certainly the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Herta M\u00fcller in 2009. The concept of the \u201cEastern Turn\u201d can be further contextualized and theorized in the works of a plethora of authors who have recently received prestigious literary prizes, among them several Swiss authors with Eastern European origins. In this article, novels by authors who immigrated with their parents at a young age to Switzerland are analyzed with a focus on memory narratives and sensorial perceptions of early childhood experiences and perceptions in Eastern European countries. The concept of the \u201cEastern European Memory\u201d represents a syllogism of these narratives. The second generation, called Secondas <\/em>and Secondos<\/em> in Switzerland, searches for an identity in a transcultural space where the parental heritage and language collide within a system that is marked by a diglossic German language situation and a divided society on topics of migration and European integration. The gyration of these circumstances can release a narrative force that constitutes a literary \u201cEastern European Memory\u201d coupled to a distinct Swiss socialization process.<\/p>\n

There is no perception which is not full of memories.<\/em><\/p>\n

Henri Bergson<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The phenomenon of what I attempt to define as \u201cEastern European Memory\u201d or curtailed to \u201cEastern Memory\u201d in Swiss literature is embedded in the concept of the \u201cEastern Turn\u201d in contemporary German literature (Haines 2008). Haines discusses a common \u201cprovisional unity\u201d in texts written by authors with Eastern European roots by extracting \u201c[\u2026] five sweeping generalizations concerning content, point of view, authorial intent, marketability, and form.\u201d Furthermore, she lists other similarities, \u201c[\u2026] a lived reality of communist rule, [\u2026] migration westwards, […] disillusionment with life during [\u2026] the liberation of the east, [\u2026] conflicts in Yugoslavia, [\u2026] and the disorientation of life in post-Cold War Europe today.\u201d These topoi permeate novels and stories by authors writing in German reflecting on their life as a migrant and the sufferings of their families in Eastern European countries, as also described by Biendarra (2012). A critical framework for reading German transnational literature is developed on both sides of the Atlantic. (e.g. Khattab 2012 and Trousdale 2010) A focus on the specific concept of \u201cThe Eastern Turn in German-Language Literature\u201d will be the published in a forthcoming special edition of German Life and Letter<\/em>, edited by Brigid Haines and Anca Luca Holden.[1]<\/a> Recently, several authors writing from an Eastern perspective have been awarded German literary prizes: Ter\u00e9sia Mora (Deutscher Buchpreis 2013), Sa\u0161a Stani\u0161i\u0107 (Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse 2014), Katja Petrowskaja (Ingeborg Bachmann Preis 2013), Sybille Lewitscharoff (Georg B\u00fcchner Preis 2013). Although this corroborates the phenomenon of the \u201cEastern Turn,\u201d in German literature, the term itself is only conceptualized by Haines and Holden.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Because several Swiss authors with Eastern European origins have also been awarded prestigious literary awards, I would like to move beyond the textual and meta-textual content and ask what other aspects constitute literary excellence in the narratives by so many Eastern European migrants\u2014and also by the second and third generation? Why are their stories so compelling and why do authors with an Eastern European background have such a command and mastery of language of the German language, which is the second language of the writer? I focus my investigation on recent contemporary, top-award winning writers with an Eastern European origin in German-speaking Switzerland where authors face an additional language barrier besides the dichotomy between an Eastern-European mother-tongue and German, namely the diglossic situation of regionally (not socially) defined dialects (Mundart). Schwyzert\u00fctsch <\/em>(Swiss German) is used for all forms of oral communication in Switzerland, while the standard German language or High German is the common writing system (Schriftsprache). The diverse, oral Swiss dialects \u2014 written only to express Helvetic idiosyncrasies and in a small local \u201cMundart\u201c literature \u2014 are very distinct from the standard German language. The fact that migrants learning German cannot at first understand the Swiss and have to use the stylized-sounding High German for oral communication adds to a gulf between the native Swiss and the migrants. Overall, the Swiss do not like to speak High German, although it is the language of instruction at schools and universities, as well as formal communication on TV and Radio, where many broadcasts are also in dialect. This dilemma has been an everyday reality for centuries in the multilingual country that has four national languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh), and Switzerland has always been \u2014 a fact, which is often forgotten \u2014 a country of immigration because it was spared by wars and because of its neutral status. Nevertheless, a referendum to curb immigration was accepted in February 2014 by a slight margin, which was highly criticized by the EU with whom Switzerland has an agreement of free movement of persons.<\/p>\n

The emergence of an \u201cEastern European Memory\u201d in German Swiss Literature after the Second World War began with Erica Pedretti who was born in 1930 in \u0160ternberk (or Sternberg), the former Czechoslovakia. She came to Switzerland in 1945, but only received asylum in 1952 when she returned from the U.S. and married Swiss artist Gian Pedretti with whom she has five children, a fact that cannot be overlooked since telling the family story to the next generation often is an impetus to write. She began writing about her childhood memories of war-torn Warsaw, Poland, Auschwitz, and Prague in the 1970s. She has received many literary prizes, such as the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1984 and the Maria Luise Kaschnitz Prize in 1996; most recently she was co-awarded the Swiss Book Prize in 2013. Pedretti is also an accomplished artist and sculptor (one of her large works is displayed in Zurich Airport). In all her works, memories of war, flight, and the loss of \u201cHeimat\u201d are expressed by what she defines as a method of palimpsest (in her essay \u201cSchreiben & \u00dcberschreiben\u201d), which she also applies in many of her art work (e.g. painting on newspaper). Her texts distinctly belong to the genre of Erinnerungstexte<\/em>. They are spawned by the \u201cSchwierigkeit, mit etwas fertig zu werden\u201d (the difficulty to come to terms with something)[3]<\/a> (Heiliger Sebastian<\/em> 10), namely the haunting memories of what happened in Eastern Europe: the advancement of Russian troops, the deportations and internments, the psycho-terror of control, the murders, the suicides in the family, the rape of women, and life in exile. \u201cDo you remember\u201d (inserted in English into the text) is a sentence that the protagonist Anne deeply hates in Heiliger Sebastian<\/em>, yet it is exactly this question that stirs up the detritus of history influencing her life and art, reflecting Pedretti\u2019s own autobiographical experiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cWie kommt man um Erinnerungen, um etwas, das war, herum? Nur ein Versuch, jetzt und hier zu sein, jetzt von hier zu sprechen, wenn das m\u00f6glich w\u00e4re [\u2026]\u201d (Heiliger Sebastian<\/em> 78) (How do you get around memories, avoid something that was? Only an attempt to live in the present and speak, here and now, if that would be possible [\u2026]).<\/p>\n

Practically all texts (and art works) by Pedretti represent attempts to come to terms with her haunting Eastern memories; they cause the reader to reflect on their own lives and memories which consequently fuse with the fictional figures through Pedretti\u2019s style that seeks to trigger a wave of remembrance through fragmentary images \u2014 a form of collage \u2014 mixed with historical facts, but also with gaps, and distinct, repetitive questions that remain unanswered in the narrative that speaks to the senses of the reader who could feel trapped in the mesh of autobiographical fiction and historical remembrance. Cocalis evaluates the style in Pedretti\u2019s text Engste Heimat <\/em> as follows:<\/p>\n

\u00a0There is no coherent narrative line, but rather a series of themes or images drawn from childhood memories [\u2026]. One message of the book is that no matter where one currently lives, one\u2019s Heimat <\/em>will always remain in the memories of childhood, which one must endeavor to preserve, regardless how painful such memories might be (Cocalis 782).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How do memories become words is a central topos in all ten books and a myriad of other texts by Pedretti which she most often connects to fragments of childhood experiences and correlates to open questions to the reader challenging him\/her to come up with an answer.\u00a0Memories are not imaginations; memories are based on sensorial experiences. \u201c[\u2026] the senses operate in relation to each other in a continuous interplay of impressions and values.\u201d (Howes 47). I base my further investigation of literary texts by authors with Eastern-European roots on Howes\u2019 theories of sensual relations since Pedretti\u2019s texts and art epitomize the convergence of memory and text.<\/p>\n

At the same time as Pedretti\u2019s first publication of stories and novels based on her Eastern memories, Elias Canetti (1905-1994), another memoirist made his home in Switzerland. Like Pedretti he also became a Swiss citizen. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Although Canetti spent only six years in his native Bulgaria, he later wrote vividly about his Eastern impressions in his autobiography (published in 1977). He processes sensory images of his childhood environment, and he specifically elaborates on language acquisition and formation in Die gerettete Zunge<\/em> since he meandered through many languages due to the constant emigrations forced upon him by the wars and political crises in twentieth-century Europe.[4]<\/a> He attended the \u201cGymnasium\u201d in Zurich from 1916-21 and then lived from the 80s until his death in 1994 in Zurich where he was always exposed to the Swiss diglossic language situation. The titles of the second and third volume of his autobiography also allude to the senses or sensory perceptions, Die Fackel im Ohr<\/em> (The Torch in my Ear) and Das Augenspiel<\/em> (The Play of the Eyes), as well as other texts such as Der Ohrenzeuge: F\u00fcnfzig Charaktere<\/em> (Ear Witness: Fifty Characters) and Die Stimmen von Marrakesch<\/em> (The Voices of Marrakesh). As we shall see below, sensory perceptions from early experience in the heritage culture and language(s) mixed with the culture(s) and language(s) of the adopted country are crucial for the development of narrative forces, even though topics such as the dislike of foreigners and an inner identity crises from living in between cultures \u2014 which occupy the public discourse around migration as well as migration literature today \u2014 are not explicitly expressed in Canetti\u2019s writings. (Sievers 307)<\/p>\n

Since then, a rich palette of contemporary Swiss authors with Eastern European origins have exerted a strong influence on the quadri-lingual Swiss literatures in the 21st<\/sup> century. In the German part of Switzerland, women writers such as Christina Viragh (from Budapest, Hungary), Dragica Raj\u010di\u0107 (born in Croatia), Irena Bre\u017en\u00e1 (from Bratislava, Slovakia), and Zsusanna Gahse (Hungary) are challenging the controversial, political discourse around migration, neutralization, integration, and citizenship in their novels written in a protean, poetic language.<\/p>\n

Writers Ilma Rakusa (Slovakia), Melinda Nadj Abonji (Serbia), Catalin Dorian Florescu (Romania), and Erica Pedretti (former Czechoslovakia) have all been awarded the prestigious Swiss Book Prize since its inception in 2009. Melinda Nadj Abonji also won the acclaimed German Book Prize in 2010 for her debut novel Tauben fliegen auf <\/em>for which she additionally received the Swiss Book Prize a few weeks after the success at the \u201cFrankfurter Buchmesse.\u201d These honors were unexpected, yet much celebrated sensations and a reassurances of literary excellence influenced by painful \u201cEastern Memories,\u201d notably also in the light of the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Herta M\u00fcller in 2009.<\/p>\n

Years before Herta M\u00fcller received this highest literary recognition in the world for her writing, she spoke at a poetic symposium in Zurich in 2003 about her early memories influenced by \u201cdie genaue Liebe, die Zugeh\u00f6rigkeit und der Diwan im Zimmer des Grossvaters\u201d [precise love, belonging, and the sofa in grandfather\u2019s room] in the<\/p>\n

\u00a0fingerhutkleinen Dorf mit den dreihundert Hausnummern, sieben Gassen, symmetrisch wie die Rippen der Bewohner und derart flach, dass der Himmel jeden Pflasterstein sah und wie ein Glaskasten von der Stelle unten ganz zu sehen war, (da) kannte jeder jeden (everybody knew everybody in the thimble sized village with three hundred house numbers, seven streets, symmetrical like the ribs of the villagers, and it was so flat that the sky saw every cobble stone from underneath like through a glass box.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She describes how her father brings each newborn calf into the house and puts it on the bed of her grandfather who was paralyzed for the last nine years of his life. She quietly watches her grandfather, and her mind races, her brain burns with pity and disgust, which she later experiences again and again when she was interrogated and psychologically tortured by the communist state police. Because M\u00fcller\u2019s poetic lecture was reprinted in its entirety in the Neue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung <\/em>(2003), her influential comments on memory and language are included in this article. M\u00fcller describes how she learned Romanian in the factory.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cIch lernte dieses sinnliche Alltagsrum\u00e4nisch, es schmeckte mir beim Reden, als w\u00fcrde ich W\u00f6rter essen, nicht bloss sprechen. Ich habe nie auf Rum\u00e4nisch geschrieben, aber das Rum\u00e4nische aus dieser Fabrik wird in meinem Deutschen immer mitgeschrieben.\u201d [I learned this sensuous, everyday Romanian (language) which tasted as if I would eat and not just utter the words when speaking. I have never written in Romanian, but the Romanian language from the factory will always be incorporated in my German writing.]<\/blockquote>\n

In another essay of the same year, she states that\u00a0\u201cIn jeder Sprache sitzen andere Augen\u201d (in every language, different eyes are seated) and \u201cWenn ich Gelebtes in S\u00e4tze stelle, f\u00e4ngt ein gespenstischer Umzug an. [\u2026] Die Innereien der Tatsachen werden in W\u00f6rter verpackt, sie lernen laufen und ziehen an einen beim Umzug noch nicht bekannten Ort.\u201d (When I put experiences into sentences, a ghostly procession begins. [\u2026] The innards of facts are packed into words, they learn how to walk and they proceed to a territory, which was unknown when the move began). \u201c\u00dcber diese Orte schreibe ich\u201d (about these places I write) (Neue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung<\/em> 2003), M\u00fcller says.<\/p>\n

And she writes about what she saw, heard, and felt under Ceausescu\u2019s dictatorship and the totalitarian state that wanted to drive her into self-destruction, a fate so many of her friends could not resist. She says that she loved the country but hated the state to which she belonged as a German-speaking minority.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Es war das Ernstnehmen des Dazugeh\u00f6rens, welches das Dazugeh\u00f6ren zerfetzte. Ich war wie mit dieser deutschen Minderheit auch in diesen rum\u00e4nischen Gespr\u00e4chen hinter oder vor einer verschlossenen T\u00fcr, hinein- und herausgesperrt in einem. (It was the seriousness of the belonging that slashed the belonging. I was with this German minority also in these Romanian interrogations, behind and in front of a closed door, locked in and locked out at same time.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this poetic lecture from 2003 in Switzerland, Herta M\u00fcller practically laid open her Eastern memory, its correlation to her, and what compelled her to write and not keep silent about where \u201cher head\u201d and \u201cher feet go.\u201d While wanting to let go of her small village in the big valley, she gets more and more sucked into love, disgust, and fear because of the perfidiousness expressed to her by the Banat-Schwabian villagers. \u201cDas Kalb, der Diwan, der Gel\u00e4hmte und ich \u2014 dieser Ort wurde zu meinem Schleudersitz.\u201d (The calf, the sofa, the lame (her grandfather) and I \u2014 this location became my first ejection seat.) Again and again she experiences this ejection seat, it became a pattern, \u201ceine einleuchtende Formel\u201d (a plausible formula) as a reaction to the interrogations, psychological terror, surveillance, torture, and death threats.<\/p>\n

Her Eastern memory extends into the consciousness of the West. Already in the nineties of the last century, critics waited for a text by M\u00fcller about her freedom in Berlin, about this free gift. \u201c\u2019Mir wird immer wieder die Frage gestellt, wann ich endlich \u00fcber Deutschland schreibe. Ich habe jedes Mal Lust zu sagen: Schon die ganze Zeit, aber das merkt ihr nicht.\u201d (Neue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung<\/em> 2003, 66) (I am often asked the question when I\u2019ll finally begin to write about Germany. I am always inclined to say: I do already, but you don\u2019t realize it.)<\/p>\n

Explicitly writing about her adopted country is Irena Bre\u017en\u00e1, who describes in Die undankbare Fremde <\/em>(The Ungrateful Foreigner, 2012) \u2014 a much discussed, autobiographical book \u2014 about integration in Switzerland. The author\/narrator expresses how \u201cSwissness traumatizes\u201d her Eastern Memory and how the Eastern Memory \u201ctraumatizes\u201d her efforts to achieve an abiding Swiss identity respectively, although in the text she never mentions the word Switzerland or her native Slovakia where she was born in 1950, she addresses the latter as \u201cmein Land\u201d (my country) and the former as \u201cdas fremde Land\u201d or \u201cmein Mann\u201d (18) to whom she is bound in a dependent relationship, never able to divorce. The narrator\u2019s family arrived in a Swiss refugee camp just as Irena Bre\u017en\u00e1\u2019s family did in 1968. The narrator describes the journey: \u201cWir lie\u00dfen unser Land im vertrauten Dunkel zur\u00fcck und n\u00e4herten uns der leuchtenden Fremde.\u201d (5) We left our country in the usual darkness and approached the glowing foreignness.) The officer in the refugee camp asks the family what their religion is. \u201cWas f\u00fcr einen Glauben haben Sie?\u201d (What\u2019s your religion?) The parents were fearfully silent and then he asks the narrator, \u201cWoran glaubst du, M\u00e4dchen?\u201d \u201cAn eine bessere Welt.\u201d \u201cDann bist du richtig bei uns. Herzlich willkommen!\u201d (6) (And you, girl, what do you believe? In a better world. Then you are right here with us. Welcome!) These exact sentences are repeated on the last page (140) of the autobiographical narration. Within this structural frame a painful, personal integration story develops besides more tragic and disturbing stories of asylum seeking people from Eastern Europe displayed in italic letters. This form of meta-story (a narrative about the narrative) that the narrator tells are the stories that she has to translate on her job as a interpreter in court, hospitals, psychiatric institutions, schools, police stations, and prisons. They visibly cut by the means of the italic font into her own desperate personal attempts to come to terms with Swiss democracy and society.<\/p>\n

Bei uns war alles durchl\u00e4ssig, die T\u00fcren der \u00f6ffentlichen Toiletten lie\u00dfen sich nicht schlie\u00dfen, wir waren n\u00e4mlich ein einziger unteilbarer K\u00f6rper. Und ich wurde von diesem K\u00f6rper wegamputiert. Ein kleiner Finger hing lose im Weltraum. \u00c4u\u00dferte ich meine Trauer, gab man mir zu verstehen, ich alleine sei schuld daran, dass ich nicht zurechtkam. Ich blieb st\u00f6rrisch und weigerte mich in der Zwangsehe mit dem Gastland gl\u00fccklich zu werden. (35).<\/p>\n

At home (in communist Czechoslovakia) everything was permeable, the doors in public restrooms could not be locked; we were indeed one single indivisible body. I was severed and amputated from the body. A pinky dangling in space. If I uttered my grief, I was told that it was my fault that I could not cope. I remained rebellious and I refused to be happy in the coerced marriage with my guest country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tenaciously, the author\/narrator rebels against laws and flaws, customs and practices, and the malaise of everyday Swiss life and the real injustice and discrimination against foreigners. She generally reports factually to the authorities about her translation assistance in dealing with severe criminal and medical cases in hospitals and courts. Some of the migrants try to outsmart the system; they present themselves as suicidal in order to gain time or a plea for mercy against deportation. The narrator tries to justify her schizophrenic situation in wanting to help these people beyond the mere translation job; she even advises the authorities, yet repeatedly fails to distance herself from the psychological and physical pain of the refugees and asylum-seeking compatriots from Slovakia who came into conflict with the law because so many are traumatized by war, rape, abuse, human trafficking, and the lack of education; an inerasable \u201cEastern Memory\u201d of many refugees. As the narrator\u2019s own integration progresses, her translation job sets her back again and again, as if these cases of \u201cEastern Memories\u201d re-infected her wounds by exposing them to a toxin so that they cannot heal. Throughout the book, however, the narrator does not relate and connect this infiltration of the other \u201cEastern Memories\u201d with her own integration struggles, which constitutes a dramatic irony.<\/p>\n

The narration is not without humor \u2014 \u201cich entdeckte erst hier, dass ich eine angeborene Sehschw\u00e4che f\u00fcr Schmutz hatte\u201d (46) (here I discovered that I have a hereditary debility of sight since I do not see dirtiness) or \u201cin diesem Land pflegte man fr\u00f6hlich den Vorwurf, er war so gel\u00e4ufig wie bei uns das Kompliment\u201d (57) (in this country, criticism and reproach is as celebrated as a compliment in my home country.) In the end, her wits and her \u201cL\u00e4stermaul\u201d (53) (scandalmonger) which stubbornly adheres to the High German language save the narrator. But the same cannot be said of her friend and fellow immigrant Mara with whom she rebelled against the pettiness of daily life in Switzerland while yearning to find love and recognition in the \u201chusband\u201d-land. Mara is killed in an automobile accident, perhaps metaphorically, because she \u201c[\u2026] hielt den Druck nicht aus, sie fing an Dialekt zu radebrechen[\u2026]. Ihre Anbiederung schmerzte mich\u201d (115) (she gave in and started speaking Swiss-German dialect [\u2026] her chatting-up made me sick.) Eventually, the \u201cdiktatorisch Gesch\u00e4digte\u201d (the dictator-damaged woman) \u2014the narrator \u2014 becomes a citizen of Switzerland, a political activist, and a spokeswoman against discrimination \u2014 \u201csie wird heimisch im Fremdsein\u201d (136) (she integrates with her foreignness) and she enjoys the ever more multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual realities in Switzerland. This book by Irena Bre\u017en\u00e1 constitutes a valuable contribution to the integration discussions and transcultural tolerance supported by the Swiss Federal Office for Migration.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

In an analyses of \u201cTranscultural Embodiment of the Senses and Sensorial Narratives\u201d in Swiss Secondo<\/em>[6]<\/a>-Literature (literature by second generation migrants), the author shows that in order to come to terms with the immigrant background and the parents\u2019 culture, many Secondas<\/em> and Secondos<\/em> feel compelled to write in order to give them a sense of control over the painful narrative of their family story. (Zinggeler 2011) These Swiss Seconda <\/em>and Secondo<\/em> narrators strikingly and deeply describe what their senses conceived from the culture of their parents. They feel the location they left behind (or re-visit), they see vivid images of ancestors, their homes and countries, they hear voices in the native tongue of their parents and relatives, they smell and taste the heritage culture through food and drink, their lives are touched by migration stories and coming to Switzerland where the same senses are overwhelmed with new perceptions and emotions. Secondas<\/em> and Secondos<\/em> write about their families\u2019 struggle to integrate and their feelings and perceptions while finding an identity in a space where cultures collide and convolute. The dichotomy between the heritage culture and the multi-cultural, multi-lingual Swiss environment \u2014 both often experienced in a double schizophrenic manner \u2014 unleashes a desperate search for identity which can find itself in many cases only by writing. Writers such as Franco Supino, Francesco Micieli, Vincenzo Todisco, and Giuseppe Garcia who have Italian or Spanish roots, because their parents were hired as guest-workers during the economic boom in the sixties and seventies, tell their story again and again from a nexus space where the parental heritage culture and language collide with Swiss everyday realities and values, including the diglossic situation. Equally, writers who have one foreign and one Swiss parent (e.g. authors Martin R. Dean, Sabine Wen-Ching Wang, and Dante Andrea Franzetti) and many others who have migrated from countries around the globe to multicultural and multilingual Switzerland, find here a fertile ground to articulate their identity in stories and novels.<\/p>\n

I now examine the concept of an \u201cEastern Memory\u201d in the works of three award winning Swiss authors, Ilma Rakusa, Melinda Nadj Abonji and Catalin Dorian Florescu, in the context of the current socio-political Swiss culture that is deeply divided between conservative forces of the political right, the Swiss Peoples Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei) that opposes a possible European Union membership \u2014 the Swiss people have twice voted against joining the EU \u2014 and a global, open, hybrid Switzerland that embraces migration and the European spirit as an economic and cultural enrichment.<\/p>\n

It is statistically extraordinary that four writers with Eastern European origins have consecutively received the Swiss Book Prize. Why have their narratives captured the evaluation criteria of the selection committee? Is the concept of an \u201cEastern Memory\u201d somehow correlated to literary excellence?<\/p>\n

Ilma Rakusa was the first author to be awarded the prestigious Swiss Book Prize in 2009 for her book Mehr Meer: Erinnerungspassagen <\/em>(More Sea: Memories of Passages). She also received the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Prize[7]<\/a> in 2003. Rakusa was born in 1946, and she came with her family from Czechoslovakia to Switzerland in 1951. She studied Romance and Slavic languages and published several volumes of poetry and essays from her academic lectures at the University of Zurich. In all texts, her language is very poetic and lyrical. Short sentences and elliptical phrases alternate with slightly longer main phrases and sub-clauses where perceptions, feelings, and meaning erupt into literary aestheticism despite their stylistic brevity.<\/p>\n

The volume Mehr Meer: Erinnerungspassagen <\/em>consists of 69 \u201cprose memories\u201d as she calls the short stories. Her texts are predominantly autobiographically influenced and many describe Eastern European scenes and sensorial memories. Some chapters are clearly highlighted as relating Eastern European memories: \u201cBudapest, remixed; Praha; Russische Tage.\u201d Some titles of her short stories are based on Eastern European names: \u201cDostojewskij; Uliza Schwetschenka\u2026, Konzerte mit Alexej\u201d. The chapters include memories of visiting the hometown of the author\/narrator\u2019s mother, Rimavsk\u00e1 and Maribor, where she visited her grandparents as a teenager. Rakusa\u2019s memories are keenly connected to her olfactory sense, which researchers classify as \u201cthe strongest catalyst of memory\u201d (Howes 2003, 53). Ilma Rakusa writes, \u201cDas Vergessen, sage ich, macht um den Geruch einen Bogen\u201d (315) (Forgetting, I say, forgoes smells), and for her, smelling is the most astute sense of remembering. \u201cWenn es nach Heu duftet, sehe ich hunderterlei Bilder aufsteigen\u201d (When I smell hey, I see a hundreds of images emerging). Rakusa\u2019s texts are imbued with smells invoking her culture of origin and visits to the cities in former communist Yugoslavia after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the places where her father grew up, and the Hungarian home town of her mother. In the first chapter of Mehr Meer<\/em>, she tries to remember her father after he had passed away. She goes in the closet to smell his clothes and remembers fragments of the story of his life he told her only at one point, when walking in the woods; she concludes:<\/p>\n

Der Osten war unsere Bagage. Mit Herkunft und Kindheit und Ger\u00fcchen und dicken Pflaumen. Mit Braunkohle und \u00c4ngsten und Dampfloks und sukzessiven Fluchten. Wir kamen von DORT und kappten die Verbindungen nie. Nicht zu den Weinbergen zwischen Podgorci und Jeruzalem, nicht zu den Freunden an Drau und Mur, auch nicht zu den H\u00fcgeln von Rimaszombat, das nun offiziell Rimavask\u00e1 hie\u00df. Die Regime waren eines, die Topographien ein anderes. Die Sprachen, die Speisen, die Gesten. Gef\u00fchlsalphabete. Vater rechnete sein Leben lang auf slowenisch.<\/p>\n

The East was our baggage, filled with provenience, childhood, smells, and thick plums, filled with brown coal and fears and steam engines, and with successive flights. We came from over THERE and never severed the connections. Not with the vineyards between Podgorci und Jeruzalem, not with our friends on the Drau and Mur, nor the hills of Rimaszombat, which is now officially called Rimavask\u00e1. The regimes were one side, the topographies the other. The languages, the food, the gestures. Alphabets of emotions. Father calculated in Slovenian all his life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rakusa also remembers visits by Hungarians and fellow Yugoslavians at her parent\u2019s home in Switzerland where ethnic Eastern European food was served, a healing feast for the senses that deeply affected the narrator who grew up with three languages that spawned her poetic talents and turned her into an award winning author of the \u201cEastern Memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Melinda Nadj Abonji was born in 1968 in Be\u010dej, Serbia, into an ethnic Hungarian minority group. She migrated with her parents to Switzerland in 1974 (when she was five years old; the same age as Ilma Rakusa which seems to be relevant concerning first and second language development). Abonji was awarded the German Book Prize for her first novel Tauben fliegen auf <\/em> in 2010, followed by the Swiss Book Prize in November of the same year. The novel is highly influenced by the autobiography of her family, her immigrant parents, who eventually became Swiss citizens and proprietors of a cafeteria on Lake Zurich. Her sister and extended family in Serbia are all figures in the narrative.<\/p>\n

The writing style in Tauben fliegen auf <\/em>is unique and challenging: long sentences with trails of sub-clauses, inserted sentences (sometimes in parentheses), direct speech without quotation marks, questions and exclamations, ellipses, associations, flashbacks, and sudden pronominal changes, garner her a distinct structural style. The selection of words, metaphors, similes, symbolism, and allegories, in the 315-page narrative are astonishingly rich and astute, but Abonji also combines simple phrases into a long train of thoughts.<\/p>\n

[\u2026] erst als der Zug wegfuhr, habe ich begriffen, dass das der wirkliche Abschied war und nicht der in der Vojvodina, als all unsere Verwandten uns besucht haben oder wir sie […]; jetzt, wo Sie im Zug wegfuhren, war es so, wie wenn meine ganze bisherige Welt von mir wegfahren w\u00fcrde, Ihr Haus, Ihr Garten, die geliebten Tiere, der Staub und Dreck, der bleiche Herr Pfarrer in seiner dunklen Kirche, das Stimmengewirr auf dem Markt, der schwere, s\u00fcsse Duft nach frischen Pfannkuchen, Palatschinken, Onkel Piris Augen, die sch\u00f6nsten Augen der Welt, so fanden Nomi und ich, Tante Icu, die uns mit S\u00fcssigkeiten verw\u00f6hnte, an den Wochenenden, die wir bei ihr und Onkel Piri verbrachten, damit sie die fr\u00fche und sp\u00e4te Messe besuchen konnten; ich habe mit einem Mal alles vermisst, die lauten Stimmen der Menschen, die ihre Z\u00e4hne zeigten, die staubigen Strassen und die Pappeln, die Pappelbl\u00e4tter, die so z\u00e4rtlich waren mit der Luft \u2014 ich habe alles, was ich geliebt habe mit ihrer Abreise verloren [\u2026]. (276-277)<\/p>\n[\u2026] only when the train had left, I understood that this was the real good-bye and not the parting in Vojvodina when all our relatives had visited us or we them [\u2026]; now that she left by train it was as if my entire, hitherto world exited from me, her house, her garden, the beloved animals, the dust and dirt, the pale priest in his dark church, the cacophony of voices in the market, the heavy, sweet aroma of fresh pan cakes and omelets, uncle Piris\u2019 eyes, the most beautiful eyes in de world Nomi and I think, aunt Icu who spoiled us with sweet treats on weekends when we visited her and uncle Piri, so that she (Mamika) could attend the early and late mess; I have immediately missed everything, the loud voices of people who showed their teeth, the dust filled streets and the poplar trees and their leaves gently swaying in the air\u2014with her departure I have lost everything that I loved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The narrative depicts the struggles of a migrant family who moved from Hungarian-speaking Serbia to Switzerland in 1974, as told by the older daughter in a concatenation of episodes that resemble an intermittent stream of consciousness. In addition, Abonji inserts historical events, travel stories, war stories, a love story, and snapshot images of Swiss society and of the migrant milieu into the main narrative.<\/p>\n

The novel is structured into fourteen loosely connected chapters that were written by the author over six years. Although the single chapters could stand alone as short stories, they constitute a coherent narrative. They have similar characteristics, including a consistent writing style and the unchanging narrative voice. The novel tells of a search for identity, triggered by a string of clashes with the parental culture, experiences with racism and xenophobia in Switzerland, and a feeling of bifurcated displacement in a space (defined as the Secondo Space<\/em>; Zinggeler 2011) where the sensory experiences are permeated with conflicting social and generational values.<\/p>\n

Abonij\u2019s topoi derive from perceptions of society around her, infused with her Eastern memories since she and her sister were left with their grandmother in Serbia for two years until they could join their parents in Switzerland. The affinity with the Serbian homeland is associated with her maternal grandmother, her life story and family connections, and eventually her death, a loss that deeply affected the protagonist. The narrator keenly transforms the intensity of her feelings into melodious sentences. \u201cI cannot write about Africa or England, but about lives caught up in the evident antagonism between the migrant milieu and the Switzerland of the political right,\u201d Melinda Nadj Abonji told me in an interview on June 25, 2010, when her second book, the award-winning novel, was in print and its reception unknown. As a musician as well as a writer, she also stressed that the rhythm and melody of a sentence is as important for her as the inherent meaning of words.<\/p>\n

In the novel Tauben fliegen auf, <\/em>Abonji \u2014 the author\/narrator \u2014 describes how as a child, she loved to read, feel, and hear the High-German (standard) language. She read aloud to contrast words and structures with the spoken Swiss-German dialect. She continues that the German she writes is influenced by the paternal Hungarian language, and a faulty \u201cYugo-Deutsch,\u201d which adds humor and wit to the idiosyncratic word and syntax creations. She also mentions that one of her relatives thinks that she writes \u201cHungarian in German,\u201d probably in terms of sentence structure and word choices. Hearing the sounds of the Serbian low land where the family returns to visit the native Vojvodina and the voices of the Hungarian minority of her ancestors as well as of fellow migrants in Switzerland, and of her beloved grandmother Mamika, \u201cdie mit ihrer Stimme den verborgensten Winkel jeder Seele erreicht\u201d (whose voice reaches to most secret corner of every soul), all play a key role in the \u201cEastern Memory\u201d of this author.<\/p>\n

Anthropologist Marshall McLuhan\u2019s concept of the \u201cacoustic space\u201c[8]<\/a> might shed a light on why many Swiss Seconda\/Secondo<\/em> writers hear the voices of ancestors. This phenomenon is a powerful sensorial imagery in many of the narratives by Secondas\/Secondos<\/em>. McLuhan states that the act of hearing itself creates an \u2018auditory space,\u2019 because we hear from every direction at once. \u201cYet even intelligent and, especially, literate people flee from the very idea of \u2018auditory space,\u2019 because, naturally, it cannot be visualized. [\u2026] auditory space contains nothing and is contained in nothing. It is quite unvisualizable, and, therefore, to the merely print-oriented man, it is \u2018unintelligible.\u2019\u201d[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

When Secondas<\/em> and Secondos<\/em> first hear the story of their family background, they often feel coerced or guided to fill this void by imagining the foreign places and absent people that are sounding and resounding in their minds. Hearing another language within the family increases auditory sensibilities as sounds are central to making sense and to knowing or exploring the truth about the family background. Constantly hearing two languages interlocks the soundscapes in what Zinggeler defines as the Secondo-Space<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Sounds that are often perceived as voices or a calling also emanate from nature and places. Steven Feld (in Howes 2005) theorizes about these interrelationships of sound, space, and time in his definition of acoustemology.<\/p>\n

Acoustemology means an exploration of sonic sensibilities, specifically of ways in which sound is central to making sense, to knowing, to experiential truth. This seems particularly relevant to understanding the interplay of sound and felt balance in the sense and sensuality of emplacement, of making place. For places are as potentially reverberant as they are reflective, and one\u2019s embodied experiences and memories of them may draw significantly on the interplay of that resounding-ness and reflectiveness (Feld in Howe 185).<\/p>\n

Therefore the \u201dexperience of place potentially can always be grounded in an acoustic dimension as acoustic time is always spatialized, sounds are sensed as connecting points up and down, in and out, echo and reverb, pointsource and diffuse; [\u2026] sounds are heard moving, locating, placing points in time\u201d (Feld 185). In the absence of a first-hand memory of the place of family origin, this constellation often causes confusion in Secondas<\/em> and Secondos <\/em>who hear the ancestral language and sounds of the heritage culture. Therefore, many turn to writing to record these sound perceptions in words of their own (German) language. The narrator in Tauben fliegen auf<\/em>, for example, uses the voice of her grandmother Mamika to tell of their father\u2019s first marriage (74f.), the relationship between her two sons, as well as their political entanglements with socialism (74-79) and how their father and mother met (82f.). The narrator often depicts her father\u2019s voice and describes how he swears in his native tongue. It always has a profound effect on the narrator.<\/p>\n

[\u2026] er muss seinen Fl\u00fcchen freien Lauf lassen, die W\u00f6rter, die w\u00fcsten, derben, fliegen wie flinke Fische aus seinem Mund, und ich habe ihm nie gesagt, dass ich nichts lieber h\u00f6re als seine Verw\u00fcnschungen und Fl\u00fcche; in diesen Momenten n\u00e4mlich, wenn Vaters Zunge vor Aufregung federnde Ger\u00e4usche produziert,[\u2026] dann wei\u00df ich, dass es etwas an ihm gibt, das ich verstehe, und ich w\u00fcnschte mir, ich k\u00f6nnte Vaters Fl\u00fcche h\u00f6rbar machen, so in die andere Sprache \u00fcbersetzen, dass sie wirklich gl\u00e4nzen [\u2026] (164-65).<\/p>\n[\u2026] he allows free play to his swearing, the terrible, harsh words fly like slippery fish out of his mouth, and I have never told him how much I love hearing him swear and shout imprecations [\u2026] then I know that there is something in his malediction that I understand and I wish I could translate father\u2019s cursing into the other language (German), to make it sound glorious [\u2026].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the narrator and her sister huddle on the veranda in the house of relatives when visiting the home town and hearing their parents\u2019 voices using words they have never heard before, it sounds like a secret language (115). The narrator\u2019s mother tells a story from her family to the plants outside the window, but it is intended for her daughters since it is actually her own story. The narrator listens to the calm, soft voice of her mother, narrating the story of a girl who wanted to become a teacher but fell in love with a soldier, became pregnant, was eventually betrayed and beaten by her father, and lost her child (125f.).<\/p>\n

Hearing the distinct voices of family left behind in the dangerous war-torn country torments a Serbian employee who works in the parental cafeteria of the narrator. Her small son lives with relatives in her native town just as the narrator and her sister stayed back because the parents at first did not receive a visa for the children. \u201cH\u00f6rst du wie sie rufen, fragt mich Dragana, wenn du genau h\u00f6rsch, h\u00f6rsch du ihre Stimme.<\/em> [\u2026] Unsere Familien rufen uns und was tun wir? (150) (Do you hear how they are calling, Dragana asks me, if you carefully listen, you hear their voices<\/em>. [\u2026] Our families call us and what do we do?) Dragana wants to know whether the narrator also hears the voices and what do they tell her, does she hear them also at night? Dragana hears the voices of her sister, her son and her aunts, and they haunt her. Later, the narrator hears the two voices of Dragana and Glorija quarrelling, and she realizes how disturbing it is to hear two people arguing with each other (219). The two women employees got into a fight in the kitchen of the cafeteria. Dragana is Serbian and Glorija is from Croatia.<\/p>\n

The narrator remembers how she heard her grandmother Mamika mumbling when she lay in bed and could not sleep; she heard the soft rattling of rosary beads when Mamika moved them, again and again, and after her prayer she sang with her clear and bright voice (152). The narrator remembers when the family called their Romanian relatives on the phone, and she envisioned her relatives sitting on a sofa taking turns talking with them (156). The narrator has not seen Janka, her half-sister, for nine years, \u201c[\u2026] nat\u00fcrlich h\u00f6re ich Jankas Stimme, obwohl ich sie nur ein Mal geh\u00f6rt habe, das Ohr hat ein erstaunlich gutes Ged\u00e4chtnis\u201d (158). ([\u2026] of course I hear Janka\u2019s voice although I have heard her only once, the ear has an incredibly good memory\u2026\u201d (158). The narrator also hears Julia, a mentally handicapped girl, shouting at Mamika\u2019s funeral. One night Mamika told the girls the story of their grandfather, a prosperous farmer who owned his own land. He was interned in a labor camp for opposing fascism and the communist regime in Romania. She makes the two granddaughters sit down and she also shows them a picture of him.<\/p>\n

H\u00f6rt mal zu, so fing Mamika an, euer Gro\u00dfvater wurde get\u00f6tet und mit ihm viele andere. Ich erz\u00e4hle euch, was ich dar\u00fcber wei\u00df, damit ihr in eurem Leben nicht vergesst, dass immer alles passieren kann, das Grausamste, und es gibt Anzeichen daf\u00fcr, wenn die Menschen sich wieder ausl\u00f6schen wollen \u2014 und die Zeichen stehen im Moment sehr schlecht [\u2026] dass es wahrscheinlich Krieg geben werde (250).<\/p>\n

Listen, Mamika began, your grandfather was killed and with him many others. I tell you what I know so that you\u2019ll never forget during your lifetime that anything could happen, the most horrible things, and there are signs that mankind will extinguish itself [\u2026] there will probably be another war.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Much later it dawned to the narrator that Mamika was the only one who had foreseen another war in Serbia. When finally a visa was obtained for the little girls, Mamika brings them to their parents in Switzerland. Before she herself returns to Romania, she sings a song and the narrator remembers, \u201c[\u2026] ich habe Ihre[10]<\/a> Stimme in meinem K\u00f6rper gesp\u00fcrt, und alles in meinem K\u00f6rper hat sich geweigert, Sie gehen zu lassen [\u2026] (276). ([\u2026] I have felt her voice in my body, and everything within me refused to let her go [\u2026])<\/p>\n

Dalibor, a newly arrived Serbian refugee in Switzerland and eventually the narrator\u2019s boyfriend, told her that his ears are more precious than diamonds (196). Dalibor sings to her and she takes her shoes off when she is with Dalibor and she pushes her toes up his trousers. \u201cSie wollen ganz nah bei dir sein, meine F\u00fc\u00dfe, und dir zuh\u00f6ren. Vielleicht sollte man wirklich mit den F\u00fc\u00dfen h\u00f6ren und nicht mit den Ohren [\u2026]\u201d (267-8). (They want to be close to you, my feet, and listen to you. Perhaps we should listen with our feet and not with our ears [\u2026].) Dalibor responds that people would probably make different decisions if they listened with their feet.<\/p>\n

The sense of hearing the voices of ancestors, the voices of relatives living through another war and hearing of atrocities in the safety of Switzerland is thus an integral part of the \u201cEastern Memory\u201d in Abonji\u2019s award-winning novel.<\/p>\n

At the end of the book, the sister of the narrator invites her to go the Sihlfeld cemetery in Zurich on All Saints Day where there is a common grave for the unknown. Here they put flowers in memory of their own dead loved ones, instead of always avoiding this day. Even though it sounds weird to the narrator, the two young women remember their dead ancestors at the side of the grave of others in Switzerland. Her mother once said, \u201c[\u2026]ich wei\u00df schon, dass man mit den Toten nicht sprechen kann, aber sie h\u00f6ren zu, sie h\u00f6ren gern zu, und sie h\u00f6ren sch\u00f6ne Stimmen, \u00fcberhaupt lieben die Toten das Sch\u00f6ne (291). ([\u2026I know that we cannot speak with the dead, but they listen to us, they love to listen, and they like to hear beautiful voices, actually, the dead love everything beautiful.) The sisters sing a song together at the common grave, they collect colorful fall leaves and lay them with the flowers on the soil to remember their ancestors in Serbia.<\/p>\n

Remembering perceptions of childhood in Eastern Europe is central in the novels by Catalin Dorian Florescu. He was born in Romania in 1967 and moved to Switzerland with his parents in 1982. Therefore, his \u201cEastern Memory\u201d extends over his entire childhood and youth. Florescu is the author of: Wunderzeit<\/em> (2001) (Time of Miracle), which he describes as \u201ceine Herzensgeschichte\u201d (a story from the heart) describing the author\u2019s own migration story, followed by Der kurze Weg nach Hause<\/em> (2002) (The Short Way Home), Der blinde Masseur<\/em> (2006) (The Blind Masseur), Zaira<\/em> (2008), and Jacob beschlie\u00dft zu lieben <\/em>(2011) (Jacob decides to love) for which he was awarded the Swiss Book Prize in 2011. He was also the recipient of the 2002 Adelbert-von-Chamisso Support Prize.<\/p>\n

I shall focus on Der blinde Masseur <\/em>because \u2014 in my view and reading \u2014 this story most prominently displays an \u201cEastern Memory\u201d of Romania by expressing a distinct sensory remembrance and a revival of the senses. The narrative follows the Romanian-born protagonist, who fled with his parents to Switzerland when he was nineteen years old, as he returns to the country of his origin after living in Switzerland for twenty years. The point of departure is also closely related to Florescu\u2019s autobiography and stories of his childhood, including the perilous act of fleeing communist Romania at night. Fantasies about his first girlfriend accompany recurring motifs of love and guilt because the family left secretly. Each of the six chapters evolves from memories into a fictional story, in which Romanian and Swiss characters, scenes, and cultures are intertwined.<\/p>\n

The language of Florescu\u2019s narratives is rich, with long, well structured, and expansively descriptive sentences, whether they pertain to characters, the plot, or the surroundings. Analogies (often in the subjunctive case), similes, and metaphors triggered by Romanian customs, scenes, and characters are also prevalent. Long, lyrical descriptions (e.g. of a chestnut tree, p. 90) give the text a quality reminiscent of the great classical narratives i.e. by Goethe, Rilke, and Kafka. Romanian peasant stories, their beliefs and superstitions are interwoven into the narrative fabric along with the miseries caused by poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, assault, and war.<\/p>\n

Florescu became a writer because he takes personal pleasure in expressing images in the form of language, in telling stories about mankind and the world, and most importantly to him: creating an intelligent art form for self-fulfillment.[11]<\/a> When he was eighteen years old, he saw a television show on Lord Byron that inspired him to write texts, short stories, poems, and a play about the 1989 revolution. He also wanted to preserve his reflections of the time during the dictatorship in Romania.<\/p>\n

Der blinde Masseur <\/em>includes authentic and fantastic images of the author\u2019s\/narrator\u2019s return to Romania, where he meets a blind masseur, who possesses an extensive library of world literature. The first words of the novel describe the smell of garlic as the protagonist named Teodor enters the country. \u201cDieses Land lag unter einer dichten Geruchsglocke\u201d (6). (This country laid under a jar of dense odors.) Teodor picks up hitchhikers who bring their Romanian odor and stenches of perspiration into his car, and the smells and odors linger throughout the narrative, repeatedly described as coming from various people and places. The smells of Romanian food and feasts, especially within the circle of followers of the blind masseur and among peasants, are meticulously elaborated. It is always a smell of cabbage and potatoes, of bacon and lots of onion and garlic, mixed with the tang of cigarette smoke and a putrid stench of perspiration related to massive alcohol consumption. The blind masseur has the olfactory ability of a dog; he recognizes people by their smells first and then by their voices, which he collects from his clientele whom he coerces into reading passages from world literature recorded on tapes. Beauty \u2014 for the blind masseur \u2014 is when a book sounds well (121). Just as this character collects the sounds of books, the protagonist used to collect stories from Romanian peasants whom he recorded in his youth. He maintains that finding again the storyteller whom he recorded, and the love of his youth is the main reason to return to Romania.<\/p>\n

The good life in Switzerland is described with the smell of bread. \u201cDer erste Morgengeruch war der nach Brot. Ich wurde in der Schweiz B\u00e4ckereifahrer [\u2026] (128). (The first smell in the morning was the smell of bread. I became a driver for a bakery in Switzerland.) Swiss bread becomes a symbol of freedom and wealth, but also of suffocating affluence and opulence. \u201cWissen Sie, wie Brot riecht? Ja, das wei\u00df jeder von uns. Aber wie hundert, zweihundert, tausend Brote riechen? Es riecht gut, wenn man es nur hin und wieder riechen muss. Ich aber muss es t\u00e4glich tun. Ich sitze mitten im Brot, es wird mir \u00fcbel davon (134).\u201d (Do you know the smell of bread? Yes, everybody does. However, how to hundred, two hundred, thousands of bred smell? It smells good if you smell it occasionally. But I have the smell daily around me. I sit in the middle of bread, I get nauseated by it.) Throughout the novel, perceptions of the revisited and formerly experienced Romania and of Switzerland, where Romanian refugees become citizens, are in stark opposition or they merge into a new amalgamation in the Secondo Space<\/em>, triggering the urge to write about the convoluting perceptions of mixed and intertwined cultural expressions. \u201cWer erz\u00e4hlt, hat Macht\u201d (104) (He who tells stories, has power), says the blind masseur. Telling the migration story, the story of remembrance gives power to the migrant author.<\/p>\n

When the protagonist Teodor revisits the school of his childhood, his first sensorial experience and recollection is the smell in the building. \u201cDer Flur roch nach dem Chlor der Putzfrauen und die Klos nach Urin, das war schon immer so gewesen\u201d (56). (The hall smelled of chlorine the cleaning women used and the toilets of urine, as it always did.) He visits his old school teacher and when he hesitantly is let in, the first perception is a putrid stench. \u201cEr roch durch alle Poren nach Verwesung, aber am meisten durch den Mund, der Tod h\u00f6hlte ihn bereits von innen aus\u201d (58). (From every pore, he smelled of decay, mostly from his mouth, death hollowed him already from within.) The dying teacher is like a symbol of the former Romania, as most of the figures in this novel are; the blind masseur and his disciples, or Valeria, the beautiful first love of Teodor who lived through the dictatorship, withered now and with a broken spirit. Eventually, the blind masseur and his followers betray Teodor and travel with his passport and car to Switzerland. Elena, the peasant woman with the most beautiful voice, who does not understand what she was reading for the blind masseur, epitomizes the post iron-curtain Romania. Because of her, beauty and story-telling will prevail, as promised in the last sentence of the book as the narrator tells Elena, \u201cSo, nun bin ich bereit. Setz dich ruhig hin und h\u00f6r gut zu, denn ich werde dir jetzt eine neue Geschichte erz\u00e4hlen\u201d (271). (Now, I am ready. Have a seat and listen carefully, I\u2019ll tell you now a new story.) Memories of people in the former homeland who left an impression on Florescu are often the beginning of a new novel.<\/p>\n

The novel Zaira <\/em>is also based on a real life figure who leads the reader back to Communist Romania. The book is a historically well-researched biography of a marionette artist Zaira that Florescu processed into a fictional novel with a very dark side. His book Jacob\u2019s decides to love<\/em>, for which he received the Swiss Book Prize in 2011, is a family saga of Swabian immigrants to Triebwetter, Romania, beginning during the Thirty Years\u2019 War and spanning into the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

We cannot discuss the Eastern Memory in contemporary German Swiss Literature without including poet, writer, and activist Dragica Raj\u010di\u0107. She was born in 1959 in Croatia and came to Switzerland in 1978, but returned ten years later. In 1991 she fled the war with her three children and arrived again in Switzerland. Today, she is a member of the Federal Commission on Migration. She received the \u201cAdelbert-von-Chamisso F\u00f6rderpreis\u201d in 1995. The other Swiss writers of Eastern European origin to have been awarded this prize are Aglaja Veteranyi in 2000, Catalin Dorian Florescu in 2002, Ilma Rakusa in 2003, and Zsuzanna Gahse in 2006. Raj\u010di\u0107 is known for her idiosyncratic, grammatically incorrect, but very poetic language.<\/p>\n

Her poem \u201cdie linke Zunge\u201d (the left tongue) embodies the Eastern Memory of her native language, transferred into deliberately faulty and caustic German, to convey what happened to the people in former Yugoslavia. The Eastern European wars following the dissolving of Communist Yugoslavia in the 1990s are combined with the smaller, but not less painful, \u201cwars\u201d of integration. Every memory of pain, hatred, and flight is relived in a body that has to come to terms with identity-loss and foreignness in Swiss society through a sensorial outburst of language. The reader of her poems and stories and the audience of her theater plays are doubly challenged because of the foreignness of her ungrammatical language and the pain uttered by the characters. Thus she\/he can precisely feel and sense foreignness within the social and political Swiss realities that the migrants experience.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, why do Swiss authors with Eastern European migration background write such compelling, award-winning stories, like no other group in German-speaking Switzerland? First, their writing is spawned by the manifold sensory perceptions within the Secondo-Space<\/em> where the parental heritage, language, and culture collides with the social forces of Swiss education, the workplace, and friends. Through synesthetic writing, Secondas<\/em> and Secondos<\/em> try to find their own identity, and by telling the stories of their ancestors, they control the narrative, and it becomes a healing power. Would these authors \u2014 had they or their families immigrated to another country, such as the U.S., Canada or another German-speaking country \u2014 write in a similar fashion? Is it not also the Swiss environment and society as well as the diglossic situation in Switzerland that shaped the perception and the memories of these writers? Coming back to the epigram by Henri Bergson: \u201cThere is no perception which is not full of memories?\u201d we can see how the stark realities of Rumanian, Hungarian, Serbian, Czech, and Slovakian wars and life in communist dictatorships clash with experiences in multicultural, democratic, and capitalistic Switzerland. But how is \u201cthe alphabet of emotions\u201d (see the above quote by Ilma Rakusa) transformed into award winning stories and novels? I contend that the tradition of story-telling by the peoples from Eastern Europe has a \u2014 perhaps even genetic \u2014 influence on processing emotions and memories into words as the above-discussed authors demonstrate. Furthermore, a close reading also reveals a certain, engaging \u201cEastern European Melancholy\u201d that prevails in the works by Herta M\u00fcller, Elfriede Jelinek, Elie Wiesel, etc. where literary aesthetics and painful memories are conjured. But this trajectory requires an entirely different theoretical, critical and socio-historical approach.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abonji, Melinda Nadj: Tauben fliegen auf.<\/em> Salzburg 2010.<\/p>\n

Biendarra, Anke S.: Germans Going Global. Contemporary Literature and Cultural Globalization. <\/em>Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012.<\/p>\n

\u2014. \u201cB. AS IN BALKAN: TER\u00c9ZIA MORA\u2019S POST-YUGOSLAV BERLIN REPUBLIC.\u201d German Life and Letters.<\/em> Vol. 67.2:242-259.<\/p>\n

Bre\u017en\u00e1, Irena: Die undankbare Fremde. <\/em>K\u00f6ln 2012.<\/p>\n

Canetti, Elias: Die gerettete Zunge. Geschichte einer Jugend<\/em>, 1977 (Autobiografie, Teil 1), Frankfurt am Main 1979.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Die Fackel im Ohr<\/em><\/a>. Lebensgeschichte 1921\u20141931<\/em>, Frankfurt am Main 1980. (Autobiografie, Teil 2), Frankfurt am Main 1982.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Das Augenspiel. Lebensgeschichte 1931\u20141937<\/em>, 1985 (= Autobiografie, Teil 3). Frankfurt am Main 1988.<\/p>\n

Cocalis, Susan L.: \u201eErica Pedretti\u2019s Engste Heimat.<\/em>\u201c In: World Literature Today.<\/em> University of Oklahoma, Vol. 69, No. 4, 1995, S. 782.<\/p>\n

Florescu, Catalin Florian: Jacob beschlie\u00dft zu lieben<\/em>. M\u00fcnchen 2011.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Wunderzeit. <\/em>Z\u00fcrich, M\u00fcnchen 2001.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Der kurze Weg nach Hause<\/em>. Z\u00fcrich, M\u00fcnchen 2002.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Der blinde Masseur<\/em>. Z\u00fcrich, M\u00fcnchen 2006.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Zaira<\/em>. M\u00fcnchen 2008.<\/p>\n

Haines, Brigid: \u201cThe Eastern Turn in Contemporary German, Swiss and Austrian Literature\u201d. Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe<\/em>, 16: 2 (2008): 135-149. Web: http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1080\/09651560802316899<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Howes, David: Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. <\/em>Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 2003.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Howes, David, Ed.: Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culural Reader. <\/em>New York: Berg Publisher 2005.<\/p>\n

Khattab, Aleya (Ed.): Nationale und transnationale Identit\u00e4ten in der Literatur. <\/em>Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, New York, Oxford: Peter Lang 2012.<\/p>\n

M\u00fcller, Herta: \u201cWie kommt man durchs Schl\u00fcsselloch. Die genaue Liebe, die Zugeh\u00f6rigkeit und der Diwan im Zimmer des Grossvaters.\u201d Neue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung <\/em>27.\/28. Sept. 2003: 65.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Der K\u00f6nig verneigt sich und t\u00f6tet. Essays. <\/em>M\u00fcnchen 2003.<\/p>\n

Pedretti, Erica: Heiliger Sebastian<\/em>. Frankfurt am Main 1973.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Engste Heimat. <\/em>Frankfurt am Main 1995.<\/p>\n

\u2014. Fremd genug<\/em>. Frankfurt am Main 2010.<\/p>\n

\u2014. \u201cSchreiben & \u00dcberschreiben.<\/em>\u201d In: Gisi, Lucas Marco and Hubert Th\u00fcring und Irmgard M. Wirtz (Hg.) Schreiben und Streichen. Zu einem Moment produktiver Negativit\u00e4t. <\/em>G\u00f6ttingen 2011, S. 347-351.<\/p>\n

Rakusa, Ilma: Meer Mehr. <\/em>Graz, Wien 2009.<\/p>\n

Sievers, Wiebke. \u201cVon Elias Canetti bis Dimitr\u00e9 Dinev oder: Was ist Migrationsliteratur.\u201d \u00d6sterreich in Geschichte und Literatur <\/em>53.3 (2009), S.303-312.<\/p>\n

Trousdale, Rachel: Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination: Novels of Exile and Alternate Worlds.<\/em> New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.<\/p>\n

Zinggeler, Margrit. How Second Generation Immigrants Writers have transformed Swiss and German Language Literature. A Study of Sensorial Narratives by Authors Writing from the Swiss \u201aSecondo-Space\u2019.<\/em> Leviston, NY 2011.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Anke Biendarra and Anca Luca Holden have presented on \u201cthe Eastern Turn\u201d in German Literature at recent professional conferences in the U.S.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> The keyword \u201cEastern Turn\u201d in literature produces no results neither in the Library of Congress, nor JSTOR nor the German National Library.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> All translations in this article are by the author.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Wiebke Sievers (2009, 305). \u201cCanetti wechselte also innerhalb der ersten 35 Jahre seines Lebens f\u00fcnf Mal sein Heimatland. Der Prozess der Migration an sich scheint jedoch so wenig interessant, dass dieser in seiner Autobiographie kaum Erw\u00e4hnung findet. (Canetti moved during his first 35 years to five different countries. However, migration seems not to be an interesting topic since it was hardly mentioned in his autobiography.)<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Federal Office for Migration https:\/\/www.bfm.admin.ch\/content\/bfm\/en\/home.html<\/a><\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> The second generation immigrants are called \u201cSecondas\u201d and \u201cSecondos\u201d in Switzerland. The term originates from the 1960s\u2019 and 1970s\u2019 when a large number of Italian and Spanish guest-workers came to Switzerland during the economic boom. First, the term had negative connotations, but since Iraqi-Swiss filmmaker Samir portrayed Secondos positively in his film Babylon II <\/em>(1993), the second generation identify itself with this term. <\/em><\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> The Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preis by the Robert Bosch Foundation is awarded annually to German-writing authors of another mother tongue since 1985. It was initiated by Harald Weinrich, who lifted \u201cGastarbeiter- und Migrantenliteratur\u201d into scholarly criticism and merit in the 80s. The first recipient was Aras \u00d6ren.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Edmond Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan first introduced the notion of \u2018acoustic space\u2019 in the journal Exploration <\/em>(1953-9).<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Marshall McLuhan, \u201cInside the Five Senses Sensorium.\u201d Howes 2005:49.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> The narrator always uses the German polite form with capitalization when addressing or writing about her grandmother which signifies respect and reverence.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Unpublished interview with Florescu by the author, July, 2010.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cEastern European Memory\u201d in Contemporary German Swiss Literature Abstract The culmination of the \u201cEastern Turn\u201d in German Literature is certainly the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Herta M\u00fcller in 2009. The concept of the \u201cEastern Turn\u201d can be further contextualized and theorized in the works of a plethora of authors who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":394,"featured_media":0,"parent":4372,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4527","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/394"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4527\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/glossen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}