Gender and the Genres of Postwar Memory Culture: Novels of Domestic Decay from Haus ohne Hüter to Altes Land

Family narratives have become the dominant genre of WWII-era memory in German-speaking Europe. This talk explores the genre’s gendered histories and their implications for the evolution of postwar memory culture. Focusing on novels that link a house’s decay to a family’s disintegration, from Heinrich Böll’s Haus ohne Hüter (1954) to Dörte Hansen’s Altes Land (2015), it shows how gendered genres that originated in the 18th and 19th centuries continue to shape collective memory, acting as a site of both continuity and contestation. More generally, this work suggests that analyzing genre provides a way to track the interlocking dynamics of gender and collective memory through time.

Katra Byram is Associate Professor of German in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University. Her teaching and research engage with narrative theory, ecocriticism, and gender studies to consider how historical and cultural context affect the stories that people tell about themselves and the world around them. Her current book project, Remembering Mother: The Evolution of Memory in Postwar Germany, examines how gendered genres have shaped postwar memory culture. She is currently director of Ohio State’s Umwelt Center for Environmental Humanities and co-editor of the book series Theory and Interpretation of Narrative at Ohio State University Press.