MIRNA FUNK's DEBUT NOVEL Winternähe was published in the summer of 2015 and is mostly set during the summer of 2014—a temporal proximity of plot, composition, and publication that is rare for a novel or perhaps indeed any literary work published in book form. Contemporaneity, actuality, and currency are among this novel's main concerns, as are, conversely, the role of the past and past events for the present. Winternähe explores the ways in which historicity and an awareness of the presentness of the past, of its residues both in cityscapes and objects as well as in collective and individual histories, shapes an understanding of our very sense of now and thus of our present selves.
Upon its publication the novel received widespread attention in the feuilletons of German newspapers and online magazines, won an award for work by emerging writers, and was shortlisted for another. It is, claimed one enthused reviewer, “der radikalste von vergleichbaren Romanen deutschsprachiger Autoren und Autorinnen der ‘Dritten Generation’, die sich mit jüdischer Identität auseinandersetzen” (the most radical of comparable novels by German-speaking authors of the “Third Generation” writing about Jewish identity). Funk does indeed explore questions of Jewish identity from the viewpoint of the third generation after the Shoah and thus contributes to a literary and artistic field that has only been opened up relatively recently. Central concerns of third-generation writers, such as the transgenerational transmission of trauma, notions of postmemory, and recurrent questions of assimilation and alienation all play a role in Funk's novel. Even more importantly, however, they are rendered more complex— and in this sense are also radicalized—by unusual and complicated constructs of family and identity. For example, Funk's protagonist Lola is a member of both the third generation (because she is the granddaughter of survivors) and the second generation (since she was brought up by her grandparents, who thus shaped her relationship to the world and to history). Lola's position in the succession of generations is determined, on the one hand, by the fact that it was her grandparents and not her parents who lived through the Shoah and, on the other hand, by her experiences as a child whose primary caregivers were survivors.
