DAS MOTIV DER GRENZÜBERSCHREITUNG IN KARPATENDEUTSCHEN AUTOBIOGRAFIEN
THE MOTIF OF CROSSING BORDERS IN CARPATHIAN GERMAN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Summary/Abstract: The Motif of Crossing Borders in Carpathian German Autobiographies. Josef Derx's Memories is the autobiography of a Wehrmacht soldier who becomes a banker after the war. Free of mythology and biblical references, but often with humorous-parodic undertones, the narrative focuses on spatial and temporal details of Derx's life story. In the description of everyday life in a prison camp and the escape from it, the transformation of the remembered self into a remembering self can be observed textually and stylistically by means of changes in tempo and rhetorical figures. Elisabeth Metzl's Ein Paradies verloren aber wir leben (A Lost Paradise but We Live) tells the story of a young woman who has to flee from Bratislava to Austria in her “travelling prison” before the war, without knowing that she will leave her homeland behind forever. The search for her lost sons becomes a personal odyssey.

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