The Epistemology of Writing Childhood: Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Der Verlorene

The child's voice and her/his suffering from the cruelties of history have served as a point of identification with the victim, but often at the cost of diffusing historical specificity and culpability. Against the backdrop of such a trend, this reading of Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Der Verlorene examines how this text mobilizes the perspective of a child witness. The central role of a child enables a literary perspective that carefully over-writes the child's sense of immediacy and emotional vulnerability with an adult's sense of critical distance and belatedness. In this way, the text simultaneously accentuates and contests the stance of naiveté as a way to gain insight into the complexity of a past that resides in the present. This analysis is linked to the broader question whether literature has the potential to intervene critically in collective projections about the past. As a postmemory text, Der Verlorene gains poignancy in the context of critical memory studies that engage with our ongoing conversations about the past in non-linear, composite, and palimpsestic ways. © 2017, American Association of Teachers of German