Der Weg zum Erwachsenwerden und die Suche nach Identität in Warten bis der Frieden kommt von Judith Kerr

Abstract

Warten bis der Frieden kommt is the second part of an autobiographical trilogy in which the author Judith Kerr presents both her own experiences and the historical context of the 1930s and 1940s of the past century in a literary manner. The main character Anna has to flee from Germany together with her family in the year 1933. They first arrive in Switzerland, then in France and finally in England. While in the first book we encounter a very young and partly naive nine-year-old protagonist who tries to understand and interpret the world surrounding her, in the second part we are being presented with Anna as a teenager who spent the last seven years of her life as a refugee in foreign countries. As a consequence we can observe a change of perspective from the point of view of individual and collective memory. In the following article I aim to analyse to what extent the age of the main character influences the literary discourse in regard of the historical narrative.