Powieść kryminalna jako przestrzeń polso-niemiecko-niemieckich obrachunków z przeszłością? "Magik" Magdaleny Parys
A Crime Story as a Space of the Polish-German-German Reckoning with the Past? Magdalena Parys' "Magik" ("The Magician")

Summary/Abstract: The article offers an interpretation of the crime story Magik” (“The Magician”, 2014) by Magdalena Parys. In this interpretation special attention is paid to the picture of contemporary Germany sketched in the text. Magdalena Parys who was born in Gdańsk in 1971 is a bicontextual Polish and German writer who as a child experienced the ‘Solidarity’ emigration to Germany (the one that took place in the wake of the martial law of 13th December 1981). History plays an important role in her novels and she presents cultural and social processes that take place in Germany. In the convention of a crime story she introduces a dispute on German-Polish and German-German entanglements and memory. “Parys-Berlin” (according to Justyna Sobolewska) can be perceived as a kind of lens of collective and individual peregrinations across contemporary Germany. This is also a story of polyphonic narratives functioning in social space that shows how representatives of a society which experienced subsequent waves of migration, cope with the past. In this cast of characters a significant part is played by the protagonists whose experience reflects Polish and German cultural complexity.

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