Hermeneutik der Vergangenheit bei Kathrin Schmidt und Barbara Köhler

For many authors who grew up in the GDR, the motif of childhood (though with no trace of idyllic reductionism) functions as the core of a complex network of symbolic relationships, codified memories and imaginative linguistic associations, which allow important insights into the way individual identity is reconstructed in times of social and political crisis, as for example after 1989. In the work of Kathrin Schmidt and Barbara Köhler gender-specific elements which determine how the present is perceived are interwoven with an evaluation of unconscious experiences from the past that have been stored by the body as a kind of mémoire involontaire. Here the work of memory is therefore undertaken in the context of a highly productive tension between the political and the private, between verbal hermeneutics and an intuitive grasping of that which has gone unspoken.