Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion by Friederike Eigler (review)

Friederike Eigler’s latest monograph contributes to discussions of German memory culture, which in recent years have focused increasingly on the role of Germans as victims of National Socialism and the Second World War. The expulsion of an estimated 12–14 million Germans from Eastern Europe (7–8 million in the West, 5–6 million in the SBZ) in the last stages of WWII and the immediate postwar years has assumed a central role in this discussion. While placing emphasis on different aspects, historians such as Robert G. Moeller (War Stories, Berkeley 2001), Eva Hahn/Hans Henning Hahn (Mythos Vertreibung, Hamburg 2009), and Andre Demshuk (The Lost German East, New York 2012) have all argued against the notion that postwar West Germany was dominated by silence about the Nazi past and memories of flight and expulsion. Eigler’s book is one of three literary studies published very recently that confirm and utilize these historiographical findings for the literary realm (the other two are Bill Niven’s Representations of Flight and Expulsion in East German Prose Works, also published by Camden House in 2014 and Karina Berger’s Heimat, Loss and Identity: Flight and Expulsion in German Literature from the 1950s to the Present, 2014 [ed. note: see following review]).

Premised on the understanding that postwar literature has always played a prominent role in addressing painful issues of expulsion and loss, Eigler’s study offers in-depth readings of literary texts from the 1970s through the first decade of the new millennium that engage with spatial constellations in general and Heimat in particular, in the context of flight and the forced relocation of ethnic Germans (and Poles). Novels are the book’s primary focus since the genre provides an imaginary space for experimenting with place and belonging, while simultaneously dealing with geographical regions and their respective histories, which are reflected in both memories and post-memories (5). Using texts from different generations of writers as examples, Eigler skillfully demonstrates how conceptualizations of Heimat and space have been changing and how the “lost German homelands” have in reality been multiethnic and multinational liminal borderlands.

Eigler’s interest in space-bound belonging determines the study’s theoretical approach, which draws on geopoetics (here, the study of literary renderings of Heimat) and geocriticism (the larger cultural and sociopolitical implications of such narratives) in order to show “what happens when geopoetics respond to geopolitics” (21, 5). The theoretical foundations of her research are laid out in the study’s first part and utilized throughout in the following interpretations. Part One is comprised of three detailed, learned, and somewhat dense chapters that will be especially useful in orienting readers new to the fields of memory studies and the role of space in narrative and cultural theory.

Specifically, Chapter One reviews scholarly discourses on Heimat and the spatial turn, to which Eigler herself had previously contributed in a co-edited volume (Heimat: At the Intersection of Memory and Space, Berlin 2012). The author shows how recent discourses on space aim to dislodge the static “container model” in order to develop more dynamic spatial notions. Relying on theorists such as Doreen Massey and Yi-Fu Tuan, she demonstrates that there is a gap between the concepts of space and Heimat, which her study seeks to close.

Chapter Two examines the role of space in narrative theory and draws on the work of Yuri M. Lotman, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault, among others. The goal here is to demonstrate dynamic concepts of space and discuss how they are shaped and constructed by social and historical factors.

Chapter Three reviews the engagement with notions of flight and expulsion in public discourse and historiography, which is arguably the red thread running through the study. Eigler maintains that a taboo, or at least a “consistent avoidance” (133), was prevalent in academic research in the postwar decades, both in historiography and literary studies. This...