RECENT YEARS HAVE SEEN the publication in Germany of a vast number and array of multigenerational family narratives that look back to the turbulent history of the twentieth century. They look in particular to the family stories that are passed on from one generation to the next as a way of understanding and representing the past, and they also explore those that are kept secret or hidden from view and yet contribute to shaping the present. These narratives use the family as a prism through which to explore the residual impact of the historical events of the twentieth century, and in particular what Anne Fuchs has called the “agitated legacy” of the Second World War, as well as the concerns of contemporary society. The fact that many such family novels have achieved commercial as well as critical success suggests that this genre is one that has secured its place on the German literary scene.

A particular concern with contemporary German family narratives is that they tend to be written from the point of view of the third postwar generation, a generation that has no firsthand experience of the war and is therefore inevitably dependent on the accounts of others for knowledge and understanding. Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall have pointed to the discrepancies that can often emerge between what they term the “Lexikon” of objective, public knowledge about the National Socialist past and the subjective, private “Album” of stories and memories that are passed down through the family; this generation's understanding of past events is often based on secondhand knowledge gleaned from a number of different and often contradictory sources.

The difficulties involved in piecing together the fragments of the family narrative, as well as the broader historical narrative, are often thematized in these texts themselves. Friederike Eigler points to the prevalence in contemporary German literature of generational novels, which she defines as “Romane, in denen Familiengeschichte erforscht oder mühsam rekonstruiert wird” (novels in which family history is examined or carefully reconstructed).These generational novels do not confine themselves to merely telling the stories of various generations of a family but rather emphasize the constructive element that is an inevitable part of the process of reconstruction.

WHEN JULIA FRANCK WAS AWARDED the German Book Prize in 2007, she was by no means a newcomer to the literary scene. The author had already published three novels and two collections of short stories before her epic tome Die Mittagsfrau (literally, Lady Midday, the noonday witch, 2007; published in English as The Blind Side of the Heart, 2009) earned her Germany’s most prestigious literary award. In selecting Franck’s novel, the jury members were unanimous in their praise of its “vivid use of language, narrative power and psychological intensity,” calling it “a novel for long conversations.” Franck’s powerful depiction of a woman who, against the backdrop of war-torn Germany, comes to the momentous decision to abandon her seven-year-old son at a railway station certainly provides plenty of material for discussion.

Prior to the publication of the novel that earned her the prize, Franck was quite well known in Germany as one of the writers of the so-called Fräuleinwunder generation, the “wonder girls” of contemporary German literature. Volker Hage originally coined the term in a 1999 article in Der Spiegel that drew attention to a group of young women writers, including Karen Duve and Kathrin Schmidt, who were taking the literary scene by storm and whose candid writing, in his view, showed that they had no fear of clichés or strong emotions. Whether or not Hage’s observations about this new generation of women writers were correct, the label of the Fräuleinwunder stuck, and it shaped how contemporary women’s writing in German was read and marketed in the years following the publication of his somewhat problematic article. Publishers and magazines alike complemented interviews with writers and discussions of their literature with glossy photos that promoted the writers as a phenomenon in themselves, the bright stars of Germany’s literary future. Despite the fact that Julia Franck’s name was never mentioned in Hage’s article, she has always been depicted by the media as one of Germany’s wonder girls.

Franck herself has always argued very strongly against the notion of a Fräuleinwunder, asserting that it is nothing more than a marketing label and that it actually undermines the legitimacy of contemporary writing by women.