Die Bildung des Europäers – Kollektive und persönliche Identitäten im literarischen Werk von Maxim Biller

Author(s)

Henning Schluß, Caroline Vicentini-Lerch

Abstract

“In a way, ‘Bildung’ (formation/culture) is unavoidable, like catarrh with an east wind,” Roland Reichenbach once paraphrased Theodor Fontane. Of course, a CV, a “cur-riculum vitae” (as Victor Klemperer called his diaries) may not be as institutionalized or professionalized as we expect from educational institutions. At the same time, some biographies and family dictionaries (Lessico famigliare, Natalia Ginzburg) seem to give more than enough reason for the formation of the person in the turmoil of the 20th and early 21st centuries, without a “harmonious whole” being able to emerge from it, of course, as it still did appear ideal to Wilhelm von Humboldt in the 19th century. Of course, this formation, which is not able to be an identity, i.e. equality with oneself, only happens when the person deals with their collective and individual becoming. If it does this in the form of ‘permanently fixed expressions of life’ (Dilthey), then this enables us as scholars in education to trace this fragmentary formation of the person in an ex-emplary manner. Maxim Biller, whose family history stretches from the Soviet Union through Czechoslovakia to Germany, Israel, and England, is a writer who has under-taken this questioning of himself and others in more or less fictitious and unsparingly autobiographical texts. These reflective processes of formation are traced in this article and the question is asked about how collective and familial influences can be turned around using the example of the multifaceted reconstruction of a European migration biography in the course of autobiographical literary work in such a way that, al-though no identity is formed, a consistent self is formed. This knowledge could be-come pedagogically relevant to develop ideas on how to deal with the breaks in the lives of people with migration experiences in the 21st century.

Organisation(s)

Department for Teacher Education, Department of Education

Journal

Historia scholastica

Volume

9

Pages

27-54

No. of pages

28

ISSN

1804-4913

DOI

https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/006/2023-1-002

Publication date

07-2023

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

503006 Educational research

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Education, History, Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/die-bildung-des-europaers--kollektive-und-persoenliche-identitaten-im-literarischen-werk-von-maxim-biller(ce512288-d069-428f-b66d-b198f72f12d3).html