Sandra Marcu

Prosthetic Eye

 

Memory and Media in Marcel Beyer’s Spione

 

Stefanie Harris begins her article “Imag(in)ing the Past: The Family Album in Marcel Beyer’s Spione” with the assertion that most recent German fiction is obsessed with the medium of photography.  According to Harris, this is a means of dealing with the past and memory that is especially pertinent to the generation of post-war writers. Harris writes, “one of the recurring questions posed by these works of fiction concerns the interrelation of memory and media: the crisis of memory or our understanding of ourselves in not separable from the media we employ to record, store, and transmit knowledge” (163). Harris’ article, to which I will return shortly, further explores this question of media –  in this case photography – in aiding memory and the search for personal and familial identity.  The second article I found is Leslie Morris’ “The Sound of Memory”, which also addresses memory and media but with a focus on sound. Morris’ article does not directly address Beyer’s Spione, but discusses how Beyer links sound and memory in his other work Flughunde.

 

Stefanie Harris’ article emphasizes the importance photography plays in shaping a familial identity, referencing Marianne Hirsch’s Narrative Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Beyer’s figures, however, do not find clarity and answers regarding their family history and the lives of their grandparents after piecing together the photographs in their one family album. On the contrary, while other works of fiction may employ photography as a means of edification and proof of events having taken place, Beyer’s photo album “enacts an inherent contradiction, embodying both fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, evidence and imagination. Thus, our reliance on this medium must be regarded as suspect” (167).  Harris argues that the progression of the photographic process undergoes a reversal in this novel, “the image sinks into, rather than emerges from, oblivion” (167). In other words, the more the cousins study the pictures of their grandparents, the more uncertain it becomes how much of the narrative is revealed by the photographs and how much of it is invented by the imaginative grandchildren.  

 

Harris also notes that none of the photographs mentioned are actually pictured in the book. Unlike Sebald and Maron who use the photographs to underline a point made in their narration, Beyer’s work does not juxtapose text and picture to create a tension and possible competition between the two. Rather, Beyer’s text merges with the description of the photographs creating a continuous and fluid “exchange between photography and language” (169).

 

Lastly, Harris argues that Beyer’s work presents not a postmemory as Hirsch does, but rather a “prosthetic memory”, symptomatic of a generation growing up with many secrets and taboo subjects  concerning its past. “The prosthetic memory functions as a supplement, both completing and replacing what is known” (172). This is what the cousins attempt to do when perusing their family album and searching for a narrative to fill the void created by the many secrets in their family. The prosthetic memory is created by using images, sounds and various cultural artifacts (like the Spanish doll) to construct a whole.

 

Leslie Morris’ article addresses the other medium – sound – used by Beyer to reconstruct memory. In Beyer’s first novel Flughunde  (1995) the narrator is a sound engineer collecting sounds and reconstructing memory through auditory means. Flughunde problematizes how sound is often used to construct an image of a time or place, like Hitler’s emblematic speeches, where the cadence and fluctuation of his voice is more important than the actual words spoken.

 

Although Morris’ article does not address Spione, the medium of sound as linked to memory can be found in this novel as well. The grandfather, for instance, becomes increasingly reticent as time goes by. The more his first wife and her memory gets repressed, the less he speaks and interacts with his remaining family. How is the link between memory and the two media – sound and photography – illustrated in Spione? Can sound be used here to reconstruct memory as photography does? What other examples of sound as the medium of memory exist in the novel, and do these compete with the medium of photography?

 

Works cited:

Harris, Stefanie. “Imag(in)ing the Past: The Family Album in Marcel Beyer’s Spione”. Gegenwartsliteratur. 2005. vol. 4. 162-184.

 

Morris, Leslie. “The Sound of Memory”. The German Quarterly. 2001. vol. 74. no. 4. 368-378.