Speaker
Description
This contribution examines two contemporary novels of translingual German literature, authored by Dana Grigorcea and Cătălin Dorian Florescu, both Romanian-Swiss writers whose works engage deeply with cultural memory and historical change in Romania. Their narratives address the legacies of communism, political repression, and the complex historical layers that shape Romanian cultural memory.
Grigorcea’s Die nicht sterben (2021) portrays a post-communist Wallachian setting marked by the lasting effects of Romania’s major historical transformations. Florescu’s Der Feuerturm (2022) constructs a symbolic, fictional tower associated with the historical landscape of Bucharest, a narrative space that condenses a century of trauma, political violence and collective memory.
Both novels explore crisis not only as a moment of change but as a relational principle, understood here as the ways in which vulnerability emerges through intergenerational ties and through the continuous dialogue between past and present within Romanian cultural memory. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory (2009), Conrad Lluis’s Vulnerable Modes of Existence (2025), and recent approaches to cultural vulnerability and crisis mediation (Masschelein et al., Mediating Vulnerability, 2023), the contribution argues that Grigorcea and Florescu conceptualize vulnerability as a generative force that fosters reflection, resilience, and renewed forms of belonging.
By placing these narratives in dialogue, the analysis shows how translingual literature articulates sustainable memory practices: practices that reinterpret crisis, preserve complex historical narratives, and cultivate solidarity through shared experiences of fragility.
| Keywords | translingual German literature, cultural memory, crisis and vulnerability, sustainable memory practices, Romanian literary spaces |
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| i.ursachi@uah.es |