Abstrakt
The article analyzes the depiction of the expulsion of Germans from the Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia after 1945 in current German and Czech literature. These are framed by the 'master narratives' with which the phenomenon is captured in the respective national cultural memory.
The older narratives are nationalistically determined, the younger ones self-critical or neutralizing. The peculiarities of the cultures of remembrance after 2000 are determined by the dying contemporary witnesses and the replacement of their narratives by an 'official tradition'.
In this context, German and Czech narratives also converge again, because both sides are concerned with making a long repressed and silenced narrative tellable again, whereby the novels often appear as an evocation of trauma.