“Sind wir nicht dazu verurteilt, unsere Eltern zu lieben?”: la construcción del sujeto literario a partir del reencuentro con el padre en Nachdienst de Melitta Breznik

Abstract

The (literary) text has frequently become the chosen medium for confronting and trying to come to terms with a traumatic past. In this context, literature has very often illustrated how the most painful memories can be caused by those closest to us. In many of these texts, parental figures cast a shadow over childhood, turning it into an agony, rather than a paradise which nobody ever wants to abandon. Since the seventies, these processes of family investigation, far from becoming extinct, have flourished in German-language literature, as can be seen in the numerous novels published in recent years, which depict the dialogue with the figures of the parents. The present article will show how Melitta Breznik portrays the need of the subject to reconcile herself with her own childhood, in order to be able to free herself from the traumatic memories which still haunt her, in order to constitute a unified subjectivity.