Magister: Fremderfahrung
Living in times of globalization implies that life occurs on shifting borders rather than in clearly defined spaces. Globalization makes the world accessible to the individual—and more ambivalent at the same time. The individual may experience alienation in the intimacy of home, and home in the distant foreignness. Alienation and foreignness thus become part of our identity.
In my Magister thesis, I was interested in how Herta Müller and Heinrich Heine, two authors from different times, expressed experiences of alienation in their literary work. The experiences of Heinrich Heine and Herta Müller are different. Heine lived in exile in Paris. Writing in his native language, German, and creatively engaging with the language turned into an act of securing his identity while in exile. The experience of alienation became the driving force for his literary productivity. Strict censure forced him to embrace heteronomy, the influence of others on his work. However, Heine used this Fremderfahrung (lit. "experience of the foreign") of censure to empower his work by exploiting irony and thus regaining authority over his work, to give just one example. Through a close reading and analysis of Heine’s poems, I aimed to reveal the breaks and splits and the Zwischenwelten (in-between spaces) in Heine’s seemingly carefree lyrics.
Herta Müller escaped from Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship to Germany, experiencing alienation in her home village in the Banat, in the political regime in Romania, and in Germany. For Müller, similar to Heine, literary productivity became an act of reassuring her identity. However, Müller views language as an empty shell that just transports meaning, rather than finding language meaningful in itself. Her experience of bilingualism and abuse of language in the Romanian dictatorship resulted in a distrust of language. This Fremderfahrung in the language birthed her creative stylistic tools of personification, reification, distortion, and fragmentation to provoke a foreign/alienated view and to express therein breaks and splits and Zwischenwelten, which I sought to discover in her novels.
In my Magister thesis, I was interested in how Herta Müller and Heinrich Heine, two authors from different times, expressed experiences of alienation in their literary work. The experiences of Heinrich Heine and Herta Müller are different. Heine lived in exile in Paris. Writing in his native language, German, and creatively engaging with the language turned into an act of securing his identity while in exile. The experience of alienation became the driving force for his literary productivity. Strict censure forced him to embrace heteronomy, the influence of others on his work. However, Heine used this Fremderfahrung (lit. "experience of the foreign") of censure to empower his work by exploiting irony and thus regaining authority over his work, to give just one example. Through a close reading and analysis of Heine’s poems, I aimed to reveal the breaks and splits and the Zwischenwelten (in-between spaces) in Heine’s seemingly carefree lyrics.
Herta Müller escaped from Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship to Germany, experiencing alienation in her home village in the Banat, in the political regime in Romania, and in Germany. For Müller, similar to Heine, literary productivity became an act of reassuring her identity. However, Müller views language as an empty shell that just transports meaning, rather than finding language meaningful in itself. Her experience of bilingualism and abuse of language in the Romanian dictatorship resulted in a distrust of language. This Fremderfahrung in the language birthed her creative stylistic tools of personification, reification, distortion, and fragmentation to provoke a foreign/alienated view and to express therein breaks and splits and Zwischenwelten, which I sought to discover in her novels.