This project area is dedicated to the memory of decolonisation in French and francophone Algerian novels on the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), their translations into German and their circulation in the German-speaking sphere.
The Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), officially recognized as a ‘war’ by the French National Assembly in June 1999 and for a long time excluded from historiography on both sides of the Mediterranean, reveals a specific moment in the Algerian and French culture of remembrance. Embedded in varied (contrasting) dynamics of social, political and cultural attitudes toward memory and commemorative practices, the thinking about “the war without a name” (guerre sans nom) and its effects has also given serious consideration in different writing and narrative styles of literary texts. Following the concept of ‘cultural memory’ according to Jan and Aleida Assmann, literary writings both ‘store’ and transmit memories of the past and can be thought of as a medium of memory.
Situated at the intersection of literary studies, translation studies and memory studies, the subproject follows up on this approach and is dedicated to the memory of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) in novels written in French and investigates their translations into German as media of transcultural memory. In this context, the translations are not only considered as interlingual rephrasings of the source texts (linguistic transfer), but also – within the framework of the ‘translational turn’ in the humanities – interpreted in a broad and metaphorical sense that goes beyond the genuinely (inter)linguistic dimension. By ‘transferring’ knowledge, physically lived experiences and memories represented in the source texts into new linguistic and cultural environments (‘travelling memories’), the literary translations guarantee not only the ‘afterlife’ of these texts; considering the translations as a form of rewriting and remediation, they are also adapted to the new (target) memory culture and therefore undergo transformations and (semantic) shifts. How do translations enable their reception and circulation in memory cultures other than the original one? How do French and Francophone Algerian novels remember the Algerian War of Independence, and how do the literary translations as media of transcultural memory reconstruct and shape the transcultural and transnational reappraisal, transmission and transformation of these memories?
The subproject analyses a corpus of selected novels representing different views (mémoires croisées; passés (re-)composés) on the Algerian War of Independence in the interplay of ‘histoire(s)’ and ‘Histoire’. In addition to narratives from a French perspective and an Algerian point of view, the project takes into account aspects of gender and investigates literary voices of different (social) groups and individuals affected by the war (e.g. FLN, OAS, pieds-noirs, harkis, appelés) as well as (traumatic) memories of the past and their ‘(living) connection’ transmitted to the second and third generation (postmemory).
The doctoral research conducted in this project area is co-supervised by Désirée Schyns.