Dieter Forte’s novel ‹The house on my shoulders›, a trilogy published between 1992 and 1998 and extended into a tetralogy in 2004, traces European history from medieval Italy to post-war Germany. Focussing on the origins and evolution of a single family within European history as a story of progress (from early Renaissance and Enlightenment up to the 20th century), we discover the contrast of two different and yet parallel traditions of European historicism: story telling as an eccentric and individual perception, ignoring any official calendar of time and events, opposed to all official or centralised history telling. Topographic categories of centre and margin transform perception and narration. Thus, Forte evokes a vertical dynamics between North and South (from Italy trough France to Germany) and an eternal or magical axis between Eastern and Western Europe (from Poland to the Ruhr). In the following, we will try to examine the way that Forte enlaces this parallel and competitive tradition of official and individual perception and narration of European history. The 20th centuries catastrophes reveal individual, eccentric perception and narration of history as a corrective to all official and compromised narration of history as a progress.
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Ritte, Jürgen: Die Geographie von Geschichte und Erzählen im Werk Dieter Fortes. <http://www.germanistik.ch/publikation.php? id=Die_Geographie_von_Geschichte_und_Erzaehle
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Ritte, Jürgen: Die Geographie von Geschichte und Erzählen im Werk Dieter Fortes. In: Michael Stolz, Laurent Cassagnau, Daniel Meyer und Nathalie Schnitzer (Hg.): Germanistik in der Schweiz (GiS) Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Akademischen Gesellschaft für Germanistik. Heft 10/2013. Bern: germanistik.ch 2013, S.409-418