Perpetration and narration: the paradigm of post-war Greek literature from a comparative perspective

• Applicant: Dr. Athanasios Anastasiadis
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269394822

The project sets out to produce the first monograph that analyses the relationships between the narration of perpetration, strategies of concealment and the desire to forget from a narratological, commemorative and comparative perspective. It takes the premise that the fiction contains both open and concealed perpetrator discourses as well as sophisticated victim/perpetrator constellations which are attended by literary innovation. Up to now, the analysis of literary texts as complex representations of perpetration has been accorded very little attention in academic research. This interdisciplinary approach is based on the research of specific aspects of literature, cultural sciences, history and social psychology. Backed up by a corpus of texts from four generations of authors over seven decades, it confirms the term perpetration theoretically and generates a narratologically substantiated and historically perspectivized typology model. At the same time, it brings the phenomenon of forgetting into the commemorative focus and highlights the correlations between overarching social discourses, generational perspectives and individual forms of remembering and forgetting. The focal point of the study is the post-war Greek literature that deals with the various conflicts of the 1940s (German occupation, resistance and collaboration, civil war). The Greek paradigm is significant because the complex political relationships gave rise to a historical constellation which does not permit clear-cut victim/perpetrator roles. The victim discourse still dominates public debate in Greece right up to today and this has meant that only a limited coming to terms with perpetration has taken place. To support this thesis, a sub-corpus of less widely studied books of post-war German literature will be included, which deal with perpetration and more closely experienced guilt in the context of the crimes committed by German Armed Forces during the Second World War. The project promises important findings from a cultural and literary perspective: it will develop a heuristic model for the analysis of fictional representations of perpetration, and enable this model to be used for other historical constellations and cultures of memory. It reconstructs the various narrative and contextual frameworks in which perpetration is portrayed and brings memory patterns into the focus, which are a component of both individual and collective memory. The Greek culture of memory is an illuminating example of how fiction treats the topic of perpetration in Europe after the Second World War. Researching this subject also has a current socio-political relevance in the light of the recent crisis in German-Greek relations which has witnessed increasingly virulent debates on the roles of victim and perpetrator in the media and among the general public of both countries.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants