Nicht-Deutschland. Sentidos de lugar y memoria alemana en Faserland de Christian Kracht

Swiss author Christian Kracht’s (1966) novel Faserland (1995) is regarded as a seminal work of late twentieth-century German-language literature, as its travel narrative set the paradigm for the literary movement known as Popliteratur. The novel is deeply intertwined with the senses of place associated with the regions that serve as its settings, most notably the North German island of Sylt and the Alpine city of Zurich. Of particular interest to the present paper is the way in which the memory of National Socialism shapes these senses of place and proves fundamental to the narrator’s compulsion to flee from one location to another. This paper argues that the protagonist does not construct distinct senses of place for each location he visits. Rather, he projects onto every city the senses of place through which he first experienced the island of Sylt during his childhood, hoping to find one that corresponds to it completely without generation what Aleida Assmann calls reanimations, that is, the activation of memory and its attachment to a place, thereby producing sites or places of memory. I further argue that the novel establishes a dialogue with urban imaginaries that reshapes the geographical imagineries of Switzerland and Germany. Finally, I propose that, although the novel was not initially read as a critique of the Swiss imaginary of innocence with regard to Nazism, it nevertheless influenced the senses of place through which Popliteratur came to narrate space.

Keywords:
Senses of place; German memory; travel narrative; topoi