My thesis develops the idea of a 'maternal performativity', harnessing the work of Judith Butler and numerous other feminist theorists, to offer new ways of looking at 1970s and 1980s literary texts by ten German-speaking women writers. In my introduction, I outline previous feminist approaches to mothering, and argue that as yet, maternal agency has not been adequately theorized. The project of theorizing maternal agency is, I contend, vitally important, given the traditional view in Western culture of the mother as passive. Butler's notion of performativity can assist in his project, I suggest. I argue for the performative conception of both mothering and of literature, and link both of these to the issue of ethics, here understood as involving embodiment, relationality and discursive challenge. To different extents, all of the texts examined here depict mother as marginal, abject or insane, thus performatively demonstrating the cultural operations of exclusion, and the need for a maternal agency to be developed and enacted. I am, then, performatively reading these texts as performatively highlighting the need for a maternal performativity, as it is implicated and manifested the issues of, respectively, community, corporeality, the mother-child relationship, the family, and discursive production. In my conclusion, I look further at the question of a maternal writing and explore the ethics of literary reading and knowledge production. I suggest that in the light of the developing fields of new reproductive technologies and genetics, it is imperative that we develop new understanding of corporeality, community and care, a task to which my thesis aspires to contribute.

The following thesis analyses the literary development of the author Brigitte Reimann from her early publications to the novel <i>Franziska Linkerhand</i>. The themes and literary figures as well as the formal structure of the author's work are examined in order to highlight continuities between the earlier stories and the novel, but also to show that considerable shifts occurred in the course of her literary career. 'Erinnerung' 'Erlebnis' and 'Gespräh' constitute the three areas within which Reimann's concerns shift; 'Erinnerung' generally referring to the author's choice of a memory framework in her stories; 'Erlebnis' to her drawing from personal experience as a means of creating an authentic reflection of GDR 'Alltag'; and 'Gespräh' to the social and political issues thematicised in her work. Owing to the dramatic extent to which her writing changed during her career, a pluralistic methodology has been chosen to locate specific features of individual works: this involves an analysis of the cultural-political background to her literature, an interpretation based on the author's biography; a feminist approach, and formal narratology which reveals how the various, sometimes conflicting, elements of Reimann's work function within a given text.

Despite his being a founder-member of the <I>Gruppe 47</I>, Wolfdietrich Schnurre's work has been largely overlooked by academics, even though his contribution to the West German literary scene has been considerable. This oversight is partially explained by Schnurre's preoccupation with the exploration of failure and guilt in his fiction: features which initially ensured prominence for the author, but which increasingly proved less attractive to readers. This study traces Schnurre's thematic and narrative development through a fifty-year literary career, to establish that an acute sense of personal guilt lies at the centre of his fiction. An accurate biography for Schnurre is established, of the years 1939-1945 in particular, in order to compare Schnurre's version of events with fictional accounts of life under the Nazis. Two periods of his life dominate Schnurre's fiction: his childhood in Berlin, against a backdrop of street-fighting between the Communists and the Brownshirts; and Schnurre's six-and-a-half years in the German army. Both periods come to be associated with guilt only after Germany's surrender in May 1945. Schnurre's belief that he should have opposed the Nazis informs his subsequent fictional work throughout his career, prompting him to present an idealised version of the past. He repeatedly returned to a small nucleus of autobiographical events to examine them from various angles, applying to them a range of literary styles and ideologies, in order to lay the past to rest and to rediscover a lost sense of identity. Schnurre's career is placed against the context of the collapse of National Socialism, the Cold War and the growing political and economic success of the Federal Republic. Schnurre, as presented in this thesis, becomes a representative figure, both of a generation and of a kind of sensibility.

Despite winning the prestigious <I>Heinrich-Mann-Preis</I> for <I>Der Hohlweg</I> (1963), Günter de Bruyn, the GDR author, considered the novel to be flawed; he had been constrained to force the projected autobiographical account of his wartime experiences into the uncongenial mould of a Socialist Realist <I>Entwicklungsroman</I>. Taking this novel as an initial point of reference, the present study charts the way in which a tension between private and public forces has shaped all his prose work. In particular, a marked discrepancy emerges between de Bruyn's stated reticence about writing openly about himself and a consistent recourse to what might be termed personal authenticity. The appearance of <I>Zwischenbilanz</I> (1992), the first volume of his memoirs, can be seen as the natural culmination of his career and represents a corrective to <I>Der Hohlweg</I>. The publications between these two works can be divided into two phases, each marking de Bruyn's development as a writer. <I>Buridans Esel</I> (1968) and <I>Preisverleihung</I> (1972), the novels comprising the first phase, are both relatively conformist, as de Bruyn sought his authentic literary voice. The novels of the next phase, <I>Märkische Forschungen</I> (1978) and <I>Neue Herrlichkeit</I> (1984), are much more critical works. This study will show <I>Das Leben des Jean Paul Friedrich Richter</I> (1975) to be pivotal in de Bruyn's career. Ostensibly a biography, it criticises aspects of GDR life, such as censorship, reflecting de Bruyn's greater confidence. In addition, the author's extensive research into Germany's cultural past, surveying subjective writing in specific, may be read as a rejection of Socialist Realism in favour of literature which paradoxically achieves universality through an intensely personal medium.

Although the response of West German writers to the revival of interest in the national question since the late 1970s has attracted considerable academic comment, little critical attention has been paid to the fact that, in dealing with this theme, certain writers employed the unique literary mode of satire. It is the aim of this study to provide a corrective to the current critical neglect of satire by analysing the different ways it has been used as a means of participating in the national debate. The concern throughout is to consider satire's function as 'Erkenntnismittel', that is to say, to examine whether satire is a tool capable of extracting new insights from the debate. The study therefore seeks to ascertain the extent to which the devices specific to satire are capable of generating a valuable critical perspective on the German Question which is unavailable to other literary discourses. After a detailed account of the national debate and a general introduction to satire as a literary mode, the study takes as its starting-point three West German texts from the 1980s which explore various aspects of the German Question: Martin Walser's <I>Dorle und Wolf </I>(1987), Hermann Peter Piwitt's <I>Deutschland: Versuch einer Heimkehr</I> and Peter Schneider's <I>Der Mauerspringer</I>. These texts have been selected as comparative material against which to judge the more markedly satirical works examined in greater detail in the subsequent chapters, namely Günter Grass's <I>Kopfgeburten</I> (1980) and <I>Unkenrufe</I> (1992), Thorsten Becker's <I>Die Bürgschaft </I>(1985) and Wolfgang Pohrt's <I>Endstation</I> (1982). The final chapter employs the post-unification text of <I>Unkenrufe</I> as a yardstick against which to assess the insights generated by the earlier works from the 1980s and concludes by isolating the specific features of the satirical mode which make it an appropriate tool for grasping and opening up the national theme.

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This thesis examines a number of post-reunification writings of two German authors, Martin Walser and Gunter Grass, with regards to their engagement with the Nazi past. The decades since the reunification have seen an unprecedented number of public debates on the legacy of National Socialism, its significance for a newly sovereign German state and its adequate representation. Even though the notion of literary engagement and its representatives have undergone a devaluation in the post-Wende years, the two eminent FRG authors Grass and Walser have been at the centre of a number of these controversies. My original contribution to research consists in an inquiry into the ethics informing these authors' renewed engagement with the Nazi past as well as an analysis of how these ethics translate into their poetics. In doing so, I do not only consider the German context but also range of international discussions that draw on the Holocaust as a normative moral touchstone and as a paradigm for dealing with traumatic legacies of the past. While previous enquiries into the recent German literary engagement with National Socialism have drawn on contemporary trauma theory as a critical framework, I argue that the extent to which notions of trauma and psychoanalytical categories have seeped into popular culture has not been accounted for. Thus I consider lay trauma theory as a cultural backdrop that provides a vocabulary for 'emplotting' narratives of past suffering in a fashion that endows them with a sense of authenticity and, hence, legitimacy but that may also immunise them against political criticism.

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