Childness and the Writing of the German Past

This book examines the depiction of childhood and the Nazi German past in post-1989 German literature. Developing a new theory of ‘childness’, the study analyses how contemporary authors use tropes of childhood in their engagements with Germany’s National Socialist past. The book features the work of Sebald, Beyer, Walser and Forte.

Nora Maguire is Assistant Professor in Germanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She completed her PhD in 2011.

«Maguire is very much in control of her subject and provides a fresh and stimulating reading of post- texts which have received substantial scholarly attention. She challenges critics’ often peripheral or broad-brush readings of the function of childhood through a robust, focussed, and detailed analysis. The monograph will be a welcome addition to the rapidly expanding field of childhood studies, and most particularly to explorations of childhood and child figures in German-language literature. Indeed, ‘childness’ may well come to be adopted more widely as a productive critical framework. This study makes a first-rate opening to Peter Lang’s new series ‘Studies in Modern German and Austrian Literature’.» (Alexandra Lloyd, Germanistik in Ireland, 2014)

Contents: Childness and the discursive landscapes of the ‘new’ Federal Republic – The tabula rasa and the innocent eye in Dieter Forte’s – Childness and the ‘New Right’: Martin Walser’s – The violence of innocence in Marcel Beyer’s – ‘Enchanted hunters’: Paedophilic motifs in the work of W.G. Sebald – Innocence, death and Sebald’s structures of mourning – Intimations of mortality: Childhood memory and the child’s perspective in Sebald’s ‘Il ritorno in patria’, ‘Max Aurach’ and – The dream of wholeness: Childness, memory and subjectivity in – Childness and the poetics of persuasion.