The Volga German Displacement in Soviet Kazakhstan in Gerold Belger’s Dom Skitalca

• In Event: Our Past Is All but Fragments: Collective Memory in Contemporary World Literature by Writers of Post-Soviet Origin

Abstract

This article explores the concepts of “memory” and “home” in Gerold Belger’s novel Dom Skitalca (The House of the Wanderer, 2003). The author examines the traumas of exile and the displacement of identity experienced by German community, deported in 1941 from the Volga Autonomous Region to the Auls and Trudarmiya of northern Kazakhstan. Belger’s literary language serves as a means to reconstruct the biographical stratification inscribed in the body, to critique society’s historical memory and capture a state of “in-betweenness” within the Soviet Union.

Author

• Sara Ravaioli, Sapienza U of Rome (Italy)