Memories in front of the Wall. Writing the Division from Grass to Sebald

Abstract

It is now 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell down. In that moment the world public opinion thought the ‘end’ had come for a number of processes of division and conflict (between East and West, of Cold War, too). Someone even thought of a supposed end of history. Are 30 years enough to touch that history from a distance, to organize those emotional and psychic images of political and psychological division? From a more limited perspective, it is useful to summon those literary documents that represented division in words. This article searches for some contributions from symbolic German authors of the time before, during and after the division of German. The literature of division, which is intertwined with memory, deals with the detail and doesn’t manage to get rid of it. However anguished it may look, this literature helps in dealing with the memory of the Wall, nowadays. This article investigates how literature represented the memory of the conflict at the beginning and at the end of the experience of division – Günter Grass and W. G. (Max) Sebald – adding the renowned first novel by Christa Wolf, that came from that very East that built the Wall.