Issue 6.
Christine Goelz
Christine Goelz is a Senior Researcher at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe (GWZO, Germany), where she currently co-ordinates the interdisciplinary project Playgrounds of Insubordination. Topographies and Expressions of Counter-Publicity in East Central Europe. She studied East Slavic Studies, Modern German Literature and Pedagogy at the universities of Tuebingen, Munich, Moscow and Hamburg. She completed her doctoral thesis on the poetry and self-conception of Anna Akhmatova in 1999. The focal points of her research are the poetics of classical modernism, the semiotic and intermedial aspects of ‘Soviet childhood’ in the 20th and the 21st centuries, narratological concepts of the author, of space, and of literary character. She is currently researching the topic of ‘fool/rogue/idiot character’ and space in contemporary East Central European literatures and film. She is the co-editor (with Karin Hoff and Anja Tippner) of Films of Childhood – Childhood in Film. Examples from Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe (Peter Lang, 2010).
6.3 Jáchym Topol’s Fictional Statement on the Possibility of Immersive Remembrance
The new media have brought with them new forms of engagement with history. Jáchym Topol’s most recent novel, which plays with a grotesque war of memorial strategies in the Czech Republic and Belarus, reacts to this challenge with intermedial references, including structural imitation and a computer game. This article describes the textual means of creating an immersive experience that include literary modelling of the narrative strategies on the first-person shooter computer games. The article shows how a critical commentary on current practices of engaging with history, from commercialisation through banalisation and political reinterpretation, is transformed into the action of the novel, and how this memory-thriller uses its borrowings from the genre of computer games to fulfil its own mission—the revitalisation of history via immersion in a fictional world, full of both hot and cold sites of memory.
Language of contribution: English