Erindringsarbejdets poetik i Julia Butschkows Apropos Opa og Camilla Hjørnholm Olsens Mørkekammeret

Abstract

The Poetics of Memory Work in Julia Butschkow’s Apropos Opa (2009) and Camilla Hjørnholm Olsen’s Mørkekammeret (2019)

The article explores the poetics of memory work in Julia Butschkow’s Apropos Opa (2009) and Camilla Hjørnholm Olsen’s Mørkekammeret (2019), two semi-autobiographical novels that revisit the trauma of World War II from the perspective of descendants of Nazi collaborators. Both novels revolve around female narrators who undertake a personal and affective form of memory work in order to make sense of inherited silence, shame, and psychological suffering. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, the article argues that these novels engage in imaginative reconstructions of a past not personally experienced but transmitted through fragmented stories, cultural representations, and embodied affect. In Apropos Opa, the narrator confronts the suppressed legacy of her German grandfather’s Nazi involvement. In Mørkekammeret, the narrator investigates the history of her Danish uncle who fought for the Germans on the Eastern Front. Both protagonists reconstruct family narratives like a puzzle, weaving together fragments of memory, speculation, historical fact, and fiction. The article examines how these narratives address the stigmatization of familial ties to Nazism and the intergenerational transmission of guilt and estrangement. It also considers how their literary form, such as fragmented structure, metafictional devices, and intertextual allusions, underscores the instability and constructedness of memory. Finally, the article situates both novels within a broader literary trend that seeks to complicate postwar memory culture by opening up space for controversial, ambiguous, and previously silenced stories. In doing so, the texts not only navigate private legacies of trauma, but also expand the collective memory of World War II beyond the binary of victim and perpetrator.