Projektionsfigur Deserteur? Aushandlungsprozesse nachkriegsdeutscher Diskurse anhand des Motivs der Fahnenflucht in der Literatur (1948-1961)

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the literary figure of the deserter in a selection of post-war German literature. Previous studies predominantly argued that the literary motive of desertion represented a form of resistance and a literary counter-discourse to the stigma of the ,traitor to the fatherland’ that marked the dominant socio-political discourse until the late 1970s. This thesis shifts the focus by asking how the deserter/defector figure served, during the Adenauer-era (1949-1963), as a projection surface to negotiate symptomatic questions, particularly the issue of collective guilt. Against the backdrop of the discursive practices and semantics of the post-war period, this study explores and locates the ambivalences and issues encapsulated in the literary motive of desertion and shows how this motive was used to mark the discourse on collective guilt and to take a position in that question. Discursive negotiating mechanisms become primarily evident through the positioning and evaluation of desertion in relation to a value system that persisted from the time of National Socialism, particularly concerning the theme of camaraderie. The selected authors, Hans-Werner Richter, Siegfried Lenz, Alfred Andersch, Günter Grass, Bertolt Brecht, Arno Schmidt and Herbert Otto examine the validity of ethical principles such as loyalty, fidelity, and friendship by engaging with the topological antagonism, the elevation or denigration of the loyal comrade or treacherous deserter. The authors take their respective stances on the background of different spaces of experience (Koselleck), such as frontline experiences (for example Richter, Andersch) inner emigration (Schmidt) or exile (Brecht), and of different ‘horizons of expectation’, especially concerning the position and ‘function’ of post-war German literature. Blurred definitional boundaries facilitated a large range of approaches towards the deserter. The study shows how some authors process the act of desertion by drawing on existential philosophy, as in Der Überläufer (1951/2016) by Lenz, by levelling desertion with other forms of fleeing, as in Schmidts Aus dem Leben eines Fauns (1953) or by heroifying it, as in, Anderschs Kirschen der Freiheit (1952). This study thus contributes to an underexplored field in German literary studies and offers new insights into a topic that is currently gaining new relevance in the field of literature studies.