Unsettling German Memory Culture: The Role of Archives in Natascha Wodin’s Sie kam aus Mariupol

Abstract

In Sie kam aus Mariupol (2017), Natascha Wodin reconstructs her Ukrainian family history with special focus on her mother’s experience as a forced labourer in Nazi Germany and the debilitating effects of continued discrimination in postwar Germany. Wodin’s powerful narrative draws attention to a traumatized woman whose short life coincided with violent upheavals in twentieth-century Ukrainian, Russian, and German history. Based on approaches in memory studies and the archival turn, this article argues that several archives play a central role in this autofictional text: an urban archive of Mariupol that both documents and counteracts the repeated destruction of the city over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a collection of familial documents from Ukraine and Russia located primarily through online searches, and an archive that details the role of forced labour in Germany during the Second World War. The archive on forced labour challenges us to contemplate the kind of forgetting that has accompanied the public commemoration of the victims of Nazi Germany. Overall, Sie kam aus Mariupol exemplifies the role of literature, in particular autofictional texts of the postgeneration, in intervening in discourses on collective memory.