Anne Schumacher
Om Anne Schumacher
Projektbeskrivning
In my thesis, I address the phenomenon of desertion during the second world war in the German Wehrmacht and the question how the deserter is narrated in German post-war literature from 1945-1965. Before and during the Second World War, the National Socialist were able to establish certain structures, through which the party was able to influence from within the society and not from above. An example of this is what Thomas Kuehne refers to as the myth of the comradeship. Kuehne is convinced that this myth, which was strong enough to form society in a way in which the individual was encouraged to believe in destiny and hand over her/his individual responsibility, was passed on by a minority of German veterans even after the end of the war. As the majority of soldiers kept silent, it was this minority that shaped the discourse by deciding what was memorized and what was not. As the deserter served as major enemy in the myth of comradeship, he was considered to be an enemy of the German society even after 1945, and was in consequence silenced. Although the post war German literature was dominated by war stories, the deserter appears in only a few works, as for example in different works of Heinrich Böll, Hans Werner Richter and Alfred Andersch, but even in books of Walter Kolbenhoff, Arno Schmidt, Max Frisch and Siegfried Lenz.
In my thesis, I'm focussing among other things on the authors motives, pertinent time horizons: when was it written, published, etc.; and the socio-political developments during 1945 - 1965. Researchers with whom I will dialogue are, among others: Nobert Mecklenburg, Jörg Döring, Felix Röhmer Rolf Seubert, Thomas Kraft and Jens Ebert.