Introduction: Beyond the Family Novel?

FAMILY AND MULTIGENERATIONAL NARRATIVES, which experienced a boom in the early 2000s, still dominate much recent Holocaust literature and scholarship. Countless novels have been published in recent years that explore family memories of the Nazi past through the lens of the children and, more often, grandchildren of victims and perpetrators alike. Instead of a straightforward renarration of family history and memory, these texts offer investigations into memorial and genealogical gaps and the fictions they produce, putting issues of mediation and imagination, and hence the process of remembering and writing itself, at the center. This self-reflexive potential of some (although not all) family novels, emphasized by many scholars in the field, often manifests itself in complex negotiations of the relationship between fact and fiction and the rules of the autobiographical genre. Many narratives focus on the overlaps and clashes between the private realm of family memory and the public field of institutionalized historiography, supplementing established discourses on the past with alternative accounts. Numerous studies have been dedicated to the topic of the family or multigenerational novel, which appears inexhaustible: “Mit dem Familienroman ist es eben noch lange nicht vorbei.”

This optimistic assessment is questioned in a recent study by Kirstin Frieden that probes contemporary Neuverhandlungen des Holocaust. Frieden rightly criticizes the increasingly clichéd nature of many family narratives, which corresponds with a stagnation in current literary scholarship on the Nazi past and the Holocaust. This assessment substantiates Frieden's central claim that we are currently facing major shifts in Holocaust memory that are not (yet) sufficiently reflected in contemporary research. Like many other commentators, she refers to the disappearance of the survivor generation and the transition from personal and familial experiences and memories of the Holocaust to a completely mediatized and institutionalized cultural memory of the events. This is not a new insight as such; Frieden stresses, however, that the search for links to the past is complicated by larger societal transformations. The “junge Generation,” those born between 1965 and 1980, have grown up in an environment in which Holocaust memory has become entrenched in clichéd or ritualized frameworks. The lack of personal experience is thus met by an excess of images and representational conventions that provoke a “Gefühl der Übersättigung.”