THE GERMAN POSTMODERN HISTORICAL NOVEL: W.G.SEBALD’S THE RINGS OF SATURN AND AUSTERLITZ AS HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTIONS

Abstract

The postmodern forms of the historical novel have been found to be particularly receptive for the engagement with many of the central theoretical assumptions and aspects of cultural postmodernism, and they have been categorized with labels such as historiographic metafiction. These new tendencies in contemporary literature situate themselves within the discourses of literature and history/historiography: discourses that are similar to each other and equivalent in their function of narrating, thus enabling and enhancing our understanding and experience of past events. An increasing movement towards the representation and reflection of historical events and conditions has also been observable within German prose fiction since the beginning of the 1980s. This tendency seems to be closely related to a recurrence of actual story telling which is significantly different from the central aspects of German post-war literature. Furthermore, there seems to be an increasing tendency towards metafictional narration in the respective literary works referred to as German examples of the postmodern historical novel. Thus, the development from the historical to the postmodern historical novel in English fiction seems be traced here. In the light of the above, this paper investigates W.G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn and Austerlitz as significant examples of this range of contemporary innovative, critical and metafictional works in German literature.