“Mich berührt am Fremden das Vertraute”. Plea for the reading of Erich Hackl in German classes

Abstract

Erich Hackl (born 1954) tells stories about the History of the 20th Century. He follows historically authenticated stories, in which the individual is threatened by a collective power, whereby the search or clues makes him overcome temporal and spatial boundaries until getting to those moments of change, such as the Spanish civil war, dictatorships as during the Third Reich and to the totalitarian systems of Latin America. As a consequence, since the publication of his first story Aurora's Motive (1987), he is regarded as one of the best known mediators between Austrian and Hispanic culture. The suitability of Erich Hackl's stories for an awareness of oriented advanced foreign language teaching is to be depicted with the inclusion of more recent reflections on the use of literary texts in cultural studies and applied geography.