| Popis: |
In this chapter, I discuss German-language lesbian literature from the 1970s with a view to queer theories on temporality and memory. Asking how we read these texts today and how they contribute to the discussion of the 1970s as a “golden age of queer sexual politics”. David Bowie’s song “The Bewlay Brothers” (1971) serves as a model for a specific kind of interweaving of past, present and future that seems to be at work when we think “past”. At the same time, the song symbolizes a queer process of recounting the interactions and shifts of time and location. Melancholy, time and narration, queer memory and transformation are central aspects in this paper, and they are important dimensions for the reading of the texts by Verena Stefan, Marlene Stenten and Margot Schroeder. Literature does not only offer an insight in a process of memorization, but it inherits the necessity of being read, which means: literature needs to be read in order to become present—as part of a narration. What crystalizes into history often has little to do with individual memory: In memory, the 1970s are discursively imparted. It seems that literature has a lot to teach in regard to historical re-constructions and narratives. Memory is not simply a reflection of facts from the past but like a palimpsest—similar to Bowie’s song: fragmented, haunted, a flickering of images, a babel of voices and full of stories which can be written, re-written and erased. |
