ERINNERUNG UND MYTHOS IM AUTOBIOGRAPHISCHEN ERZÄHLEN

Autobiographical narrative evokes a remembered life. Therewith it has the quality of a myth, which functions as a perceiver of the origin that determines the present. Autobiographical storytelling is not just about the mere narration of the past. It's about its perceiving. With this determination, an autobiographical narrative at the same time projects into the terrain of the culture of remembrance of a society. Remembrance culture is guided by the question: What shouldn't we forget? With answers to this question, remembrance culture designs, as it were, an official reading of the past, to which all the members of the society are obliged to. Remembrance culture always includes something normative. In contrast to this normative, autobiographical texts develop a sort of individual reading which, as a narrative of an individual's life, can never claim collective validity, but is heard insofar as individual life stories, that are interwoven with the span of an epoch and that are lived and experienced under the conditions of a particular historical time. Of course, this connection is presupposed in literary autobiographies. Autobiographies assume that the author, narrator and protagonist or "hero" of the narrative are an identical entity. They are fiction, as long as they are narratives, and they are real because they take their material and the substratum of the narrative from an actual lived life, for whose truth the author as a narrator vouches. This pact of the author with the reader is the prerequisite for the functioning of autobiographical narration. The aim of this study is to explore the role and function of memory and myth in autobiographical texts. For this purpose were used selected autobiographical texts by German (Christoph Meckel, Peter Härtling) and Turkish authors (Murathan Mungan, Nedim Gürsel). In terms of content, they focus on fatherless childhoods, that is, experiences in times of crisis with a different social background, and they meet in the skepticism of literary writing towards language and memory. Unlike a social culture of remembrance, autobiographical narrative lacks the social obligation to a certain reading of the past, which has a community-building effect on the society. Autobiographical narrative is more likely to be described as a search movement exploring the possibilities of recollecting and remembering, and finally, the linguistic articulation of the remembered. Literary autobiographical texts are basically language-skeptical in modern times. In addition to working on remembering and perceiving the origin of one's childhood, they also explore language and its viability when it comes to remembering the terrible nature of a childhood, which should not be forgotten or ousted. This impulse following perception and critical accompaniment of the remembered and its official reading in the culture of remembrance of the society determines the writing and autobiographical narration of Härtling and Meckel equally as Mungan and Gürsel. The authors arrive at different literary solutions. Peter Härtling opts for a critical and language-skeptical questioning of the possibility of visualizing childhood memories with a language. Christoph Meckel opts for the evocative power of metaphorical speech to communicate the remembered. Murathan Mungan deals with photography as a mighty memory generator, and thus goes beyond the problem of memory and its perceiving through language, to the question of how a memory is actually generated. To Nedim Gürsel, who involuntarily exiled in Paris, come the memories of childhood while visiting his home and so entering a landscape that stands as a guarantor of the remembered and thus fulfills a function that in Mungan photographs, in Meckel metaphors and in Härtling the self-questioning as a narrator and protagonist. Härtling addresses the question: Who is the narrator? Meckel addresses the problem: What language can visualize the horrors of childhood? For Mungan, the question is: What evocative power do pictures have? Gürsel searches for the feeling that determines his childhood, and he consistently comes to a psychological answer, namely the endless loss experience in the face of the death of the father. The privacy of these memories becomes strikingly clear before the film of war or persecution. At the same time, these private destinies are woven into the collective destinies of their time. They are not only private, but part of the memories that have burned into the memory of their generation and which the next generations do not know and are therefore forgotten. Autobiographical narration assumes that nevertheless or just for that reason it must be told. The question remains, to whom is told. It may be the members of one's own generation, it may be the society with all generations, it may be the next generation. Such pedagogical questions of a culture of remembrance are not discussed by the authors selected here. They focus on the narration and perception of what the past. Thus, they opt for the mode of a myth in their narrative as a mode of perception of the origin of the present. This gesture of myth delimits its autobiographical individual case towards the general, in which the experiences of a whole generation are reflected.