Life Writing. Auto/biographical Family Narratives in German Jewish Contemporary Literature

Within German Jewish contemporary literature's engagement with the Shoah and Second World War, a new approach has gained traction: auto/biography. This article examines characteristics of recent German Jewish auto/biographical family narratives and discusses newer genre poetics of auto/biography. If every biography is also autobiography, these contemporary auto/biographical family narratives showcase the other side of that poetological coin: preoccupied with self-definition and self-assurance, these first-person narrators seek to position themselves in the generational chain of their families through a reconstruction of their family histories. By way of example, the article offers a reading of Marina Frenk's auto-fictional debut novel >> ewig her und gar nicht wahr << (2020) as an innovative, radically fictionalized, and polyphonous family biography.