IZfK Band 9, 2022

Spiegel der Gesellschaft von heute? Familien in der Schweizer Literatur

Les familles dans la littérature suisse : miroir de la société actuelle ?

Herausgegeben von Ralph Müller, Emily Eder und Sylvie Jeanneret

Familiengeschichten sind in den letzten dreißig Jahren besonders unter politisch-historischen Aspekten sowie mit einem erinnerungskulturellen Interesse untersucht worden (insbesondere in Deutschland und Österreich, aber auch in Frankreich). Obwohl die Schweiz in die Zivilisationsbrüche des Zweiten Weltkriegs lediglich verwickelt worden ist, ohne von den Auswirkungen in einem vergleichbaren Ausmaß betroffen zu sein wie ihre Nachbarländer, ist der erinnerungskulturelle Diskurs ebenso relevant für schweizerische Literatur. Im vorliegenden Band stellt sich zunächst die Frage, inwiefern die Modelle, die die Forschung zu Familienroman und Generationenerzählung in anderen Literaturen ermittelt hat, auch für die Literaturen der Schweiz gelten. Dabei eröffnet die Untersuchung eines mehrsprachigen Korpus von deutsch-, französisch-, aber auch italienischsprachigen Erzählungen aus der Schweiz ein Untersuchungsfeld, in dem unterschiedliche literarische Traditionen in eine gemeinsame nationalstaatliche Perspektive gestellt werden. Konkret untersuchen die Beiträge im vorliegenden Band, wie Familiengeschichten im Spektrum der schweizerischen Literaturen erzählt werden. Dabei steht die Frage im Raum, ob die Schweizer Gegenwartsliteratur im Hinblick auf die erzählten Familienstrukturen einen Spiegel oder vielleicht einen Zerrspiegel der Schweizer Gesellschaft ergibt.


Inhalt:

 
Over the last thirty years, it has become increasingly common for family histories to be researched from a political-historical perspective as well as in reference to the culture of remembrance (especially in Germany and Austria, but also in France). Despite its entanglement in the civilisational upheavals of the Second World War, Switzerland was not subject to its repercussions to the same extent as its neighbours; and yet, the discourse of remembrance is equally relevant for Swiss literature. In the present volume, the first question that arises is to what extent the research models applied to the genre of the family novel and the generational narrative in other literatures also apply to the literature(s) of Switzerland. Thus, the volume draws upon a multilingual corpus of German-, French-, and also Italian-language narratives from Switzerland in order to frame these diverse literary traditions within a common national context. In particular, the contributions to this volume examine how family stories are narrated within the broader spectrum of Swiss literature as a whole. Moreover, they ask whether contemporary Swiss literature provides a mirror — perhaps a distorted one — for viewing Swiss society itself in terms of the family structures encountered in these texts.
 
Over the last thirty years, it has become increasingly common for family histories to be researched from a political-historical perspective as well as in reference to the culture of remembrance (especially in Germany and Austria, but also in France). Despite its entanglement in the civilisational upheavals of the Second World War, Switzerland was not subject to its repercussions to the same extent as its neighbours; and yet, the discourse of remembrance is equally relevant for Swiss literature. In the present volume, the first question that arises is to what extent the research models applied to the genre of the family novel and the generational narrative in other literatures also apply to the literature(s) of Switzerland. Thus, the volume draws upon a multilingual corpus of German-, French-, and also Italian-language narratives from Switzerland in order to frame these diverse literary traditions within a common national context. In particular, the contributions to this volume examine how family stories are narrated within the broader spectrum of Swiss literature as a whole. Moreover, they ask whether contemporary Swiss literature provides a mirror — perhaps a distorted one — for viewing Swiss society itself in terms of the family structures encountered in these texts.
 
This article outlines the development of the codification of civil law, starting from the most important cornerstones of the original Swiss ‘Civil Code’ of 1912, as well as important developments in family law, and discusses their social context. It will become apparent that legislation in family law over the past decades has been primarily characterised by efforts to achieve equality. From the 1970s onwards, legislative revisions were made in an attempt to keep up with social developments. Adoption and child law were revised first, followed by marital and divorce law. While these legal bases were revised in partial steps over the 20th century, same-sex couples did not receive legal acknowledgment of their partnerships until the beginning of the 21st century. Whether non-marital partnerships should receive their own legal regulation is currently left open by the national legislature. In December 2020, however, the doors of the Civil Code opened for same-sex couples. Marriage for all was approved by the people in the vote of 26 September 2021. Nevertheless, this is not the end of such legislative revisions. In the near future, the discussion on equal rights will focus on new regulations regarding the law of descent.
 
The particular relevance of the family in human life and experience, which is addressed in family novels, is also evident in sociological studies. In what way can these views complement each other? This text is meant as a contribution to this discussion, starting from statistical data on the contemporary diversity of individual and collective family behaviors. They are summarised in five theses focusing on an elaborated, open understanding of human generativity: i.e., the individual and the institutional shaping of generational relationships. These generalizations allow us to build a bridge to studies of the family novel. I postulate that the commonalities of family sociology and the family novel can be seen in the critique of notions of normality, the tense evolution of social relationships, and, consequently, the dynamic search for personal and collective identities. These processes go hand in hand with experiences of ambivalence and practices meant to cope with them.
 
This article deals with a selection of contemporary texts by Swiss authors that address the theme of the family in various ways. The question put forward is whether such literary representations still represent today’s families or whether they miss the mark. The variety of literary forms and the spectrum of perspectives in this selection proved far more diverse than expected. Nevertheless, auto-fictional narration is still fundamental, whereby retrospectives of a life lived are conveyed from within the narrator’s own family circle. The discourse of memory continues to dominate substantial parts of the narrative, and a preoccupation with father-son and mother-daughter relations within family constellations remains relevant. However, humour and irony are also important as a means of creating distance at moments where reality verges on the absurd and the narrator’s own family is shown in a comic light, or where the terrain is delicate, as example when the action takes place in a nursing home.
 
Family relations and women’s destinies are recurrent themes in the novels of two prominent figures of Francophone Swiss literature: Anne-Lise Grobéty (1949-2010) and Rose-Marie Pagnard (1943-). Although they depict different universes, the former more politicised and the latter more poetic, a cross-reading of their works allows us to observe a similarity in the treatment of the evolution of the feminine cause within the family unit. Two of their novels from the period of 1970-1990, « Pour mourir en février » (1970) by Grobéty and « La Leçon de Judith » (1993) by Pagnard, attest to difficulty faced by a young woman in building her own identity within her family. Female friendship, moreover, is presented in both works as a prerequisite for the self-actualisation of female figures. This, however, is rejected by the family unit, which perceives it as a threat to the established patriarchal order. On the other hand, filiation novels of the 2000s, « La Corde de mi » (2006) by Grobéty et « J’aime ce qui vacille » (2018) by Pagnard, reveal a rapprochement in relations between the young girl and her family, in particular the father figure. The sorority of female characters is accepted and even recognised as an aid to the reconstruction of the family bond.
 
This contribution is based on the hypothesis that Charles Lewinsky’s novel ‘Melnitz’ should be read as the first literary cultural and social history of Swiss Jews after legal emancipation. On the one hand, it highlights the magical realist figure of Uncle Melnitz, a revenant eyewitness whose existence can be traced back to the violent persecution of Jews during the Cossack Khmelnytskyi Uprising in the 17th century, and who, following the pattern of Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, repeatedly comments on events from the perspective of the Jewish persecutees. Through Melnitz’s commentaries, the generational history of the Meijer family is simultaneously presented as Swiss history and as a collective Jewish history of memory. The identity of the Jews in Switzerland, which is perceived as stereotypically homogeneous from the outside, is in this way continuously renegotiated in the novel between adaptation and self-assurance, such that the demarcation between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures becomes increasingly blurred.
 
Fleur Jaeggy was born in Zurich in 1940 and has lived in Italy since the 1960s. The family reminiscences that emerge from her autobiographical works — “I beati anni del castigo” (1989) and “Protelerka” (2001) — are often detached, fragmentary, permeated with melancholy and dominated by introspection, converging in the category of ‘filiation stories’, as defined in 1999 by Dominique Viart. In fact, the author’s family history seems not to exist: it is broken up; it is incomplete and unknown to both the narrator and her reader. Only after her parents’ death does the collection of inherited objects — notebooks, photos, portraits, papers, and so on — allow the reconstruction of the family to take place by following the narrator’s thread of memory. Her desire to retrace her genealogy without following a chronological order and to fill in its silences, ellipses, and omissions corresponds less to a poetics of representation than to a need for answers that became imperative for the author at the time of writing. The work is, in this sense, less a portrait than an analysis.
 
In «Tu écriras mon nom sur les eaux», publisfhed in 2019, Jean-François Haas proposes a reflection on the family based on two distinct models set in opposition. The first, limited and exclusive, corresponds to the archetype of the Swiss family at the beginning of the 20th century. Haas describes it extensively in the first part of his novel before breaking it down and proposing a more open and human counter-model based on fiction and the potentialities offered by literature. Playing on intertextuality, polyphony, and the use of personal pronouns, among other things, Haas lays the foundations for an ideal but illusory family model, encompassing humanity in its entirety. By constantly weaving links between different moments of the 20th century and the present narration, Jean-François Haas is also building a strong critical discourse on Switzerland itself — its institutions and its conservatism.
 
This article focuses on the detective novel „Hunkelers Geheimnis” (‘Hunkeler’s Secret‘) (2015), the ninth Peter Hunkeler novel by Swiss-German author Hansjörg Schneider (b. 1938). It sets out to treat in detail the image of the family with regard to the characters of the perpetrator and the murder victim, and to situate them in a historical context. In doing so, it draws not only on the attendant literature but also on personal correspondences with the novelist. The first part of the article explores what role the motif of the family plays in the classic and post-classic crime novel, especially in the context of German-speaking Switzerland. The presentation of the plot structure is then followed by an analysis and interpretation of the events leading to the puzzling murder at the heart of the novel, which reflects Switzerland’s refugee policy during the Nazi period. The fourth part considers the historical context of the events as well as Schneider’s interdiscursive work with specialised literature and historical sources. Attention is then drawn to blurring the line between victim and perpetrator. Finally, the last part examines the family of the titular detective himself.
 
This case study addresses the question of families, both in literature and in society, with reference to the 2017 mystery novel « Qui a Tué Heidi? » (‘Who Killed Heidi?’), by Swiss writer Marc Voltenauer. It sets out from the assumption that the family, despite the historical changes it has undergone, is still perceived as a site of ‘the uncanny’ that fascinates French-speaking authors, including those whose main plot focus is not its depiction. According to this initial hypothesis, Marc Voltenauer puts family matters at the service of his literary project. Several family stories are woven into the police investigation at the core of the novel’s narrative structure. These literary families, laden with secrets, dysfunctional, and potentially pathological, are depicted in a hyperbolic way. Is this just a consequence of genre norms (the detective novel is based on a set of stereotypes), or does the author paint a troubling picture of the contemporary family and its metamorphoses? This is one of the questions the study attempts to answer.
 
According to a frequently encountered view, the family novel is not at all compatible with the modern phenomena of life. On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that such reproaches presuppose a trivialised genre that may be innovatively destroyed or renewed. In response to such reproaches, this article proposes a more general notion of the family novel, denoting those narratives whose content and structure are essentially shaped by the relationship between characters in terms of intergenerational biological, cultural, or material continuities and discontinuities. In addition, this article argues that the issues of intergenerational relationships still play a significant role in shaping literature. For instance, actual kinship without stable, affective relationships is an ongoing theme. However, there are also Swiss German family novels in which the failure of establishing a strong emotional intergenerational relationship is narrated with a new laxity, in which failing families or the renunciation of family attachment are no longer treated as existential issues.