ERZÄHLEN UND WIEDERERZÄHLEN. ANALYSE NARRATIVER REKONSTRUKTION IN ZWEITINTERVIEWS MIT DEUTSCHSPRACHIGEN MIGRANT*INNEN IN ISRAEL

When narrated, past events are reconstructed (cf. Gülich 2007a: 37) and therefore adjusted according to the new speaking context (cf. e.g. Norrick 2005; De Fina/Toscano Gore 2019). However, it should be noted that past events and experiences are not reconstructed in their original, rather in their remembered form (cf. Gülich 2012). Actually, memories should not be considered as fixed entities: on the contrary, they are dynamically reworked, selected and combined (cf. Chafe 1994, 2008) in the retrieving process. Given that tellability (cf. e.g. Sacks 1992; Baroni n.d.) goes hand in hand with ‘memorability’ (Erinnerungswürdigkeit, cf. Gülich 2012: 625), narrative reconstructions of past events and experiences result from the interplay between three dimensions, namely experience, memory and narration (cf. Rosenthal 2010). These dynamics characterise narrative-autobiographical interviews as well: when speakers select stored memories in order to reconstruct their life story (cf. Leonardi 2016), they oscillate between the lived past (i.e. their displaced consciousness, cf. Chafe 1994) and the here-and-now of the interview situation (i.e. their immediate consciousness, cf. Chafe 1994). Drawing on the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope (cf. Bakhtin 2008), it can be said that they shift between two different spatiotemporal configurations, namely the chronotope of the story told and that of the telling situation. The analysis of retellings, i.e. narrative reproductions and recontextualisations of a story that has already been told by the same speaker in similar or even different occasions (cf. Schumann et al. 2015a: 10), can be fruitfully applied to the investigation of the reconstruction and re-interpretation processes brought along by narratives of past events. Researchers have shown a growing interest in this phenomenon, predominantly in the field of cognitive psychology (cf. e.g. Anderson/Cohen/Taylor 2000; Pasupathi 2001; Dudukovic/Marsh/Tversky 2004; Marsh 2007). Despite the increasing interest this research topic has recently gained also in the field of linguistics, no extensive research on spontaneous, conversational retellings has been carried out so far, which might be also traced back to the difficulties in finding retelling occurrences in existing corpora (cf. Chafe 1998; Norrick 1998; Schumann et al. 2015a). Most linguistic studies tended to primarily focus on the lexico-syntactic differences and similarities between subsequent versions of the same story (cf. e.g. Quasthoff 1993; Chafe 1998; Norrick 1998; Birkner 2015). A challenging and neglected area in existing research on retellings, which, to my knowledge, has been explored by Barth-Weingarten/Schumann/Wohlfarth (2012) only, concerns the analysis of their prosodic structure. Since their observations and findings are worth further exploring, even on the basis of a wider corpus, this thesis aims at bridging the above-mentioned existing gap in the prosodic analysis of retellings as well as at broadening current discussions on retold stories. In order to explore the processes of repeated remembering and reconstructing in subsequent tellings of the same events and/or experiences, attention was not only given to narratives of personal experiences, but also to narratives of vicarious experiences (Geschichten aus zweiter Hand, cf. Michel 1985), i.e. of events the current teller did not witness or experience firsthand (cf. Norrick 2013a, 2013b). For the purposes of this study, comparisons were (mainly) drawn between two subcorpora, i.e.: a) selected passages from first narrative-autobiographical interviews with second generation German-speaking migrants in Israel, who were first interviewed by Anne Betten between 1999 und 2006 within the framework the so-called Israelkorpus project (cf. Database for Spoken German (DGD) of the Leibniz-Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim: https://dgd.ids-mannheim.de; see, in particular, the subcorpus ISZ: http://hdl.handle.net/10932/00-0332-C453-CEDC-B601-2); b) retellings taken from repeated interviews that I collected in 2019 in Israel with selected ISZ speakers. In order to highlight tendencies to variation and invariancy and to discuss how stored memories and formulations already used are resorted to in subsequent tellings of the same story, each interview passage was analysed with respect to its fine transcript according to the GAT 2 transcription norms (cf. Selting at al. 2009). A qualitative multi-perspective approach combining aspects from Conversational Analysis (cf. e.g. Deppermann 2008) and Narrative Analysis (cf. e.g. De Fina/Georgakopoulou 2008a) allowed for a microanalytic investigation of the lexico-syntactical and prosodic design of the compared first and subsequent tellings of the same story; in addition, a meso-level analysis provided a fruitful tool to also take the narrative structure (cf. Lucius-Hoene/Deppermann 2004a) into consideration. The present work is organised as follows. After an introductory chapter sketching the research framework and the research questions, the second chapter focuses on the link between remembering and narrating, and discusses narrative models and concepts which provide further fruitful theoretical and methodological impulses for the analysis. Chapter 3 delivers an overview of research on retellings. The Israelkorpus, its genesis, structure, and peculiarities are described in chapter 4, while chapter 5 outlines the methodological approach. The analytic part is structured into two phases: Chapter 6 proposes an analysis of retold stories of personal experiences, while chapter 7 focuses on the comparison of subsequent tellings of vicarious experiences. Conclusions are drawn in chapter 8.