Entre o muro concreto e a cortina invisível

Abstract

This research explores, in Eastern European countries contemporary literature, some possibilities of trauma fictionalization when you live in an area restrained by an authoritarian state. During the Cold War, the inhabitants of countries aligned with the Socialist Soviet regime suffered with general restrictions such as the limitation of freedom of movement, the government control of the economy and the food shortages, but also suffered with a constant threat: the possibility of a nuclear war happened. Furthermore, citizens who were denounced as enemies of the state passed to be persecuted by the political police, which manipulated them through surveillance, physical violence and emotional instability. The repression atmosphere, the fear and the violence were components of a disturbing reality that created conditions for a cumulative trauma existence. The aim of this paper is to check how the traumatic experience of this time and the trauma resistance strategies are represented in literature written after the end of communist dictatorship. For this purpose, three works were selected: Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, by Thomas Brussig; A fehér király, by György Dragoman; and Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet, by Herta Müller. The works were analyzed in the light of theorists such as Theodor W. Adorno, Michel de Certeau, Gaston Bachelard, Linda Hutcheon, Boris Uspenski, among others. As in these three novels the historical context interferes in different ways in the characters’ lives, the books were analyzed separately to make possible to identify, in each one, the periods of trauma construction and internalization. This division remains in the final chapter, where the compositional aspect of the works is checked, taking into account the narrator and his spatiotemporal point of view, the organization of narrated memory and the distorting mirrors through which the period is revisited. From these analyzes, it was observed that, although they have some differences, the narratives studied bring some features that approach then and that can be considered specific representations of literature that focuses on the Cold War period.