Post-memory ex negativo in Ralf Rothmann’s Im Frühling sterben

Abstract

Since the 2000s, some of the most influential contributions to the study of transmissibility of cultural memory have been offered by Marianne Hirsch and her concept of “post-memory”. The present work aims at pointing out to what extent Hirsch’s theories are confirmed or destabilized by the historical novel Im Frühling sterben (2019), by German author Ralf Rothmann. Striving to analyze the work under the light of its self-acknowledged “autobiographical undertones”, we aim at interpreting the crises in Hirsch’s “familial post-memory” and “affiliative post-memory” model that are introduced by the disarticulation of the “perpetrator-victim” dichotomy and by the rupturing of the familial/paternal model of memory transmission by the thematization of memory ex negativo through the portrayal of the silence of the characters/witnesses presented in the novel. By investigating the work under the light of memory studies, one can notice, in Rothmann’s novel, an aesthetic-literary effort that transcends the strictly autobiographical and instigates crises in the models of representing the German traumatic collective past, in particular its effort of working-through the war crimes and atrocities of the Nazi regime and the participation or complicity of the German population in its perpetration.