Exilstrukturen in deutsch- und austrokanadischer Nachkriegsliteratur. Walter Bauer. Carl Weiselberger. Henry Kreisel.

Abstract

<p>This thesis presents the attempt to make visible, in a representative section of the literature of German speaking immigrants, the reflection of Canadian and European reality as experienced from the temporal and spatial distance to the horror of facsism, in Canada as exile and sanctuary. The cultural and historical experiences underlying the interpreted texts are very complex, both on the individual and collective level. Henry Kreisel and Carl Weiselberger who, as Austrian Jews, had to flee from Vienna after the national-socialist annexation of Austria in 1938 were interned as enemy aliens in England in 1940 and deported to Canada where they, after some months in internment camps, became Canadian citizens; Kreisel became much involved with the postwar development of Canadian literature and criticism. Walter Bauer, a successful writer of socially critical fiction in Germany before 1933, and of non-committal books during Hitler's rule, hoped to contribute to a new, just society with his writings after the war. His memories of the German Nazi past and the war kept haunting him as a postwar immigrant in Canada.The "exile structures" found in the fiction of these three Canadian ethnic writers correspond thematically to their individual experience of exile, interpreted under three main aspects: 1. The experience of being cast out and disconnected from the past leads to an understanding of our part in the political reality, and-of the continuity of history. 2. The existential experience of the no one's land communicates the need to assert oneself against the nothingness of oppression, destruction, anonymity. 3. The experience of living with two languages evokes the attempt to better understand both the old and the new culture, and to search for an own, synthetized cultural identity. - The interpreted literature, like any minority literature, shows elements of a self-liberating motivation.</p>