Chronotopos Amerika bei Max Frisch, Peter Handke, Guenter Kunert und Martin Walser.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the specific way in which the narrative American landscape serve as a backdrop, and is mirrored in the textual composition and movement of works by Frisch, Handke, Kunert, and Walser. After an introduction to the texts and to the theoretical tools employed in the analysis, the consecutive chapters individually examine Gunter Kunert's Der andere Planet, Martin Walser's Brandung, Max Frisch's Montauk, and Peter Handke's Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied. In all four works, the American landscape provides the base and the referential code for a "freezing" of time. Through the device of "frozen" time, the narrative America remains in a utopian condition (Schwebe), thus allowing the protagonists to distance themselves from their former European story/history. Their entrance into a new space demands a different existence and necessitates the creation of a language that has been influenced by an unfamiliar setting. The narrators' alienation from their own language and existence ultimately implies the reversal of alienation (Ent-Fremdung) and a return to their home land (Heimat). The tension of the narratives is created by the interplay between the presence of the protagonists' past and the absence of what they would like to become, while the textual movement comes from the attempt to represent a narrative America. Both influence the textual structure; Kunert's travelogue is shaped by a cubistic perspective; Walser's novel mirrors a wave-like motion; Frisch's story does not progress in a linear mode, but rather turns on its own axis. Finally Handke's text, by integrating a filmic aspect into the narrative appears to be playing simultaneously on two narrative levels. The endeavor of depicting an individually experienced America in a preexistent language is also reflected in problems of writing: Frisch, Handke, and Walser are aware of the potential danger in reducing a described object, and instead shift the more obvious emphasis of their texts to the internal life/space of the protagonist, or transfer it--as Kunert does--to external objects. By using this method the four texts accomplish an approximation of representing the unrepresentable revision of what used to be called the American dream.