Cultural, symbolic and collective memory in a literary text

Abstract

Bernhard Schlink’s novel “The Reader” belongs to the kind of works of fiction that are referred to as “remembrance and reminders” literature, thus this narrative fits into the commemorative discourse, particularly in the dimension explored by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. This pertains to the congruence of such concepts as individual memory and collective memory, or in other words, autobiographical and historical memory. Later, Halbwachs’s theory would be further developed by German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, who distinguished between “living” memory, which is born in the process of direct communication, and symbolically cultural, existing within the framework of societal representations. The idea of overlapping two memory types and the possibility of their “ratification” by the memory bearer was formulated by the French researcher in the book “Les Cadres Sociaux de la Memoire” a hundred years ago, in 1925. However, the relevance of this book is obvious today and more than at the time of its publication. B. Schlink’s novel becomes a vivid illustration of the problem of the rejection of the young generation of Germany in the first decade after World War II of collective memory in favor of individual memory, as well as an attempt to comprehend this socio-historical discourse. The aim of the work is to study the process of collective memory formation in post-war Germany depicted in the novel, refracted through the prism of personal perception of the cultural narrative.

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