History as Narrative. About the Treatment of the Past in Tanja Dückers’s Novel Himmelskörper

Abstract

In the generational novel Himmelskörper, focused on the memoryʼs topic, Tanja Dückers sketches the concept of a “sensitive historiography”, which characterizes her own literary writing, and which reminds in many aspects the historiographic considerations of Jules Michelet. Following this concept, in the historic process Dückers pretends to discover in order to later represent internal truths that unavoidably rest fragmented. The gaps and contradictions of the personal truths refer to the perspectivity and relativity of the versions of the past, and therefore to the interpretability of history. From the starting point of Micheletʼs historiographic thought and Nietzsche’s historical relativism, the present article investigates about the historiographic considerations that Dückers outlines in Himmelskörper, as well as the narrative treatment of the past.