'Memory metonymies': Music and photography in Ingeborg Bachmann and Monika Maron

This article examines two novels that deal with the problem of past representation in German literature: Malina (1971) by Ingeborg Bachmann and Pawels Briefe (1999) by Monika Maron. These novels incorporate either musical or photographic images in a metonymic mode that forms an alternative poetics of memory. Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a part implicitly represents the whole, thus not constituting the 'thing' but rather hinting at it. In shaping acoustic as well as visual metonymic manifestations, both Bachmann and Maron create poetics that reveal the partial, fragmented nature of memory regarding the 'catastrophe' in Europe. However, the transformation from voice to picture and from anonymous subjects to private family narratives, which might be associated with 'normalisation' processes, also indicates a change in dealing with the past, as it is reflected in postunification literature.