Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: The Purposes and Problems of German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century
- 1 Life Writing and Writing Lives: Ego Documents in Historical Perspective
- 2 From Erlebnis to Erinnerung: Rereading Soldiers’ Letters and Photographs from the First World War
- 3 From Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges to Der gefährliche Augenblick: Ernst Jünger, Photography, Autobiography, and Modernity
- 4 Persuasive Illusions of the Self: Albert Speer’s Life Writing and Public Discourse about Germany’s Nazi Past
- 5 The Shoah before the Shoah: The Literary Technique of Allusion in Elias Canetti’s Autobiography
- 6 “Ich schäme mich meiner Augen”: Photography and Autobiographical Identities in Grete Weil’s Leb ich denn, wenn andere leben
- 7 “Mich in Variationen erzählen”: Günter Grass and the Ethics of Autobiography
- 8 Voyeurism? Autobiographies by Children of the Perpetrators: Niklas Frank’s Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (1987) and Meine deutsche Mutter (2005)
- 9 Dismembering the Past, Remembering the Self: An Interrogation of Disability Narratives by Luise Habel and Christa Reinig
- 10 “Schicht um Schicht” — The Evolution of Fred Wander’s Life Writing Project in the GDR Era and Beyond
- 11 Thought Patterns and Explanatory Strategies in the Life Writing of High-Ranking GDR Party Officials after the Wende
- 12 “Ein reines Phantasieprodukt” or “Hostile Biography”? Günter de Bruyn’s Vierzig Jahre and the Stasi files
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
9 - Dismembering the Past, Remembering the Self: An Interrogation of Disability Narratives by Luise Habel and Christa Reinig
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: The Purposes and Problems of German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century
- 1 Life Writing and Writing Lives: Ego Documents in Historical Perspective
- 2 From Erlebnis to Erinnerung: Rereading Soldiers’ Letters and Photographs from the First World War
- 3 From Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges to Der gefährliche Augenblick: Ernst Jünger, Photography, Autobiography, and Modernity
- 4 Persuasive Illusions of the Self: Albert Speer’s Life Writing and Public Discourse about Germany’s Nazi Past
- 5 The Shoah before the Shoah: The Literary Technique of Allusion in Elias Canetti’s Autobiography
- 6 “Ich schäme mich meiner Augen”: Photography and Autobiographical Identities in Grete Weil’s Leb ich denn, wenn andere leben
- 7 “Mich in Variationen erzählen”: Günter Grass and the Ethics of Autobiography
- 8 Voyeurism? Autobiographies by Children of the Perpetrators: Niklas Frank’s Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (1987) and Meine deutsche Mutter (2005)
- 9 Dismembering the Past, Remembering the Self: An Interrogation of Disability Narratives by Luise Habel and Christa Reinig
- 10 “Schicht um Schicht” — The Evolution of Fred Wander’s Life Writing Project in the GDR Era and Beyond
- 11 Thought Patterns and Explanatory Strategies in the Life Writing of High-Ranking GDR Party Officials after the Wende
- 12 “Ein reines Phantasieprodukt” or “Hostile Biography”? Günter de Bruyn’s Vierzig Jahre and the Stasi files
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Die nächsten fünfundvierzig Jahre kann ich überfliegen, denn sie sind zum gußeisernen Paradepferd der Weltgeschichte geworden.
[I can pass over the next forty-five years, for they have become part of the cast-iron show-horse of world history.]
THIS DISMISSAL OF ONE OF THE MOST TURBULENT PERIODS in recent German history occurs near the beginning of the East German author Christa Reinig’s autobiography, Die himmlische und die irdische Geometrie (Heavenly and Earthly Geometry), and appears to obstruct the possibility of reading Reinig’s narrative as a commentary on the time between her birth in 1926 and the text’s publication in 1975. This seems a lost opportunity, for Reinig had survived the National Socialist regime and the Second World War, witnessed the deployment of Russian troops against East German protesters in 1953, and had her freedom curtailed by the partition of Berlin.
Christa Reinig is not alone in erasing aspects of her socio-historical context as part of an autobiographical narrative. Her West German contemporary, Luise Habel, also narrates a life in Herrgott, schaff die Treppen ab! (Lord, Get Rid of Staircases) which seems untouched by the wider narratives being played out in the Germany of her time. It is true that Habel displays none of Reinig’s truculent refusal to engage with her social context. Rather, Habel simply passes in silence over large-scale history. Nonetheless, the two autobiographers’ suppression of the past is striking. This essay considers the reasons for such drastic erasure of the sociohistorical context and its consequences for the autobiographer’s assertion of a subject position. It examines, too, how our understanding of history is shaped by such accounts.
The two women’s effacement of history owes much to the fact that they are disabled autobiographers. Indeed, I will argue that a disabled person’s inscription of subjectivity through autobiography may not only depend on selective erasure of historical or cultural situation, but also on diminishing the malfunctioning body that launches the narrative. However, although the two disabled women modify their representations of both self and history, such contributions to our understanding of human experience are of seminal significance. Proceeding from the embodied situation of firsthand knowledge, Habel’s and Reinig’s accounts are authentic counterparts to authorized representations of this period of social upheaval, and thus draw attention to the way that all subjects retain their integrity by reconfiguring the large-scale narratives available.
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- German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century , pp. 151 - 163Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010