Ambivalente doppelkonditionierte Narrative der Vertreibung und des Sozialismus
10.1515/9783110717679.Abstract
Contemporary crime novels and TV series which confront recent history are becoming an important medium of memory cultures in central Europe because of the way they can merge an engaging story of investigation with the process of remembering. In these novels the conventions of genre (reconstruction of the crime, final restoration of order, guilty individuals etc.) shape the act of remembering, the form of historical reconciliation and the ways in which ambivalent and conflicting memories are dealt with. The paper focuses especially on historical crime novels dealing with the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia and the time of communism, in which various conflicting moral perspectives can be harmonized or conversely highlighted by crime fiction’s narrative device of “double conditionalization.” It is this ability of crime fiction to present different moral patterns, which reflect the plurality of memory cultures in both Czech and German society, that makes them so popular among readers. However, Czech and German crime novels and TV series combine multiple moral patterns in their treatment of the expulsion and socialism and thus differ in many ways.
