Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2023
DOI:
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Refuge from War, Tracing the Youth: Hybridized Memory Narrative in Latvian Writer Anita Liepa’s Prose
Sandra Meškova
ABSTRACT:
In the context of globally flourishing memory culture of recent decades, memory narratives related to World War II, its aftermath and traces in individual and collective memory hold a specific place in East and Central European literature. The present paper regards the phenomenon of memory work in Latvian writer Anita Liepa’s autobiographical and fictionalized memory narratives depicting the time spent by the author in a refugee settlement in Flensburg from 1944 to 1947. In her autobiographical narrative Dāvana jeb Flensburgas noskaņas (A Present or Reflections of Flensburg, 2013) the writer describes her recent trip to the town in Germany where she was driven as a young girl to work in a military hospital and after the war completed studies in a Latvian refugee high school. Despite the harshness of the post-war time, years spent in Flensburg are preserved in memory as the happy time of youth marked by romantic friendships and exciting discoveries in the high school depicted in the fictionalized memory story Kā niedre būsi (As a Reed You Will Be, 1990). Tracing the memories of her youth during the trip, the autobiographical narrator juxtaposes the memory time-space (post-war Flensburg) to that of the present (Flensburg nowadays) and verifies her individual memory against the collective memory dimension merging the subjective and the objective viewpoints and reflecting on their discrepancies.
keywords: collective memory, displaced person, narrative voice, women’s life writing, World War II