Listing Instead of Telling. Enumeration as a Means of Reprocessing the Past in Contemporary German Family Narratives

The present paper expounds on the underlying interpretations and principles of the concept of “list” and its roles in present-day German family narratives addressing migration. It demonstrates how lists can serve as a means of retracing, reprocessing, and reconfiguring the past in order to discern it better. Given their specific structure and qualities, as they assist in categorising, itemising and classifying, lists prove to be an appropriate tool for first-person narrators to reminisce about past episodes paramount to their lives. For this purpose, the article analyses the family narratives of three German-speaking contemporary authors, namely Aglaja Veteranyi, Saša Stanišić, and Katja Petrowskaja. It showcases the modalities in which lists can estrange experience and transform it aesthetically. The protagonists of the literary works under scrutiny investigate their roots and heritage through lists. At the same time, they process the outcomes of the historical moments which have inevitably left marks on their destiny. From this standpoint, we conclude that lists can provide a medium for the perception of events, for the recollection of memories and the externalisation of emotions, pains, traumas, and unpleasant, uncomfortable and suppressed oscillations of the self. Moreover, lists develop a framework that foregrounds landmark moments of the 20th century, such as the World Wars, communism, the fall of the Iron Curtain, or emigration to the West. In this context, lists function in the service of reapproaching historical events while revising and reconstructing individual destinies, and simultaneously represent an instrument of reflection and self-inquiry.