The Contaminated Memory: The Representation of War 107in Literature and Journals Following the Example of MyCentury by Günter Grass

My Century counts almost one hundred narrators, each of them narrating history in their own way; and yet, the book does not depict the limitedness and the subjective partiality of the historical representation in order to outline an ideal narration which cannot be proved to be partial, subjective and contingent. Even what seems to be a positive model should be unveiled in its inadequacy and in its ambiguity – as it is the case of Remarque’s novel, and also in the case of the “miserable chronicles” never published in Adler, written by the war reporter acting as the story-teller in the chapters about the Second World War. As a matter of fact, there is not the possibility to establish linguistic and narrative structures which are able to render an uncontaminated memory: only a reader who carefully acknowledges and changes into new narrations his own and other people’s hidden texts, that is a reader who wants to catch the blindness and the forgetfulness which unavoidably accompany those narrations, has the possibility to set the historical narration free from the prison of language, and to give it back to the dynamism and vitality of being. Thus, Grass’ work does not simply provide a representation of the historical past which corrects, replaces or enriches the already existing ones, but also shows what is the epistemological fundament from which it germinates and suggests a strategy to become critical readers To briefly summarize, it is possible to state that My Century constitutes an invitation to take into consideration a fact which, oddly, seem to escape to the reader of historical works: the fact that he is not facing history but a narration of history. And if there is a narration, there is also a narrator who contaminates the historical representation, setting it within the frame determined by his own subjective, epochal and ideological position.