Writing War Child - On the Representation of Childhood in German Adolescent Literature

• Main Authors: Lin, Chien-Wei, 林倩葦
• Other Authors: Chang, Tzu-chang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/49247626533334072561

博士 === 國立臺東大學 === 兒童文學研究所 === 100 === World War II has been over now for more than 66 years. The so-called “War Child” generation who experienced the Third Reich, Nazism, Holocaust, war, fugitive and post-war time in Germany as child or adolescence is getting older. At present, the narrative memory of their experiences in World War II has become more important than ever before. Many Jewish survivors have recorded the Holocaust and their broken childhood through memory writings, which have drawn worldwide attention. In contrast, the experience of German children in World War II and their destroyed childhood have been ignored. Since the 1970s, German and Austrian authors of “War Child” generation have begun to write their childhood experiences during the Nazi period into children’s books, which are to be known in German as “zeitgeschichtliche Kinder- und Jugendliteratur”. Prof. Zohar Shavit from Israel criticized that this kind of children’s books with most emphasis on the suffering of German people would only mislead the next generations. German literary scholar Malte Dahrendorf claimed that those authors tried to represent their childhood experience in World War II, not to neglect the Holocaust on purpose. This dissertation is a research on nine books of five “War Child” generation authors, they are: Gudrun Pausewang, Peter Härtling, Christine Nöstlinger, Renate Welsh and Mirjam Pressler. After analyzing the nine titles, this research finds that these five authors started, based on their own experience in World War II, to write children books in fiction or non-fiction. Two of them even wrote fictions representing the childhood of Jewish children. Furthermore, since the 2000s, they tend to deal with the consequences of Nazism in their stories and encourage the grandchildren generation to explore the family history in World War II. In other words, these authors have two main purposes in their memory writing, which are: representing the destroyed childhood and against forgetting.