„Mit den Gespenstern sprechen“: Die multidimensionale und multitemporale erzählende Rede als „Mut- und Schmerzprobe“ in Christa Wolfs Erzählung Leibhaftig

Abstract

Christa Wolf has always considered literature as an ideology-critical medium for questioning Culture of Remembrance and memory myths. To do this, you need to talk to the ghosts. This is achieved by creating texts that experiment with the limits of language. The present study assumes that the novel Leibhaftig is the author's most honest and at the same time most successful attempt in this direction, a narrative experiment that aims to "transcend the boundaries of the sayable". The narrative is a multi-perspective polyvocal literary network. Playfully, the author experiments in two directions: with different temporal perspectives and with different forms of narrator and narrative perspective. The narrative structure is multitemporal. The level of an extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrative instance in the present is interwoven with memories from some sixty years in the past as well as from the whole history of humanity. Furthermore, the story is told in two narrative voices, both in first and third-person point of view, with the change often occurring in mid-sentence. The result is an open text that is not afraid of leaving the wound open, of settling accounts with one's own as well as with the collective phantoms.