Remembered chronotopes: recollecting crisis situations in narratives

Abstract

Many of the narratives from the Israelkorpus collected by Anne Betten fall into the “chronotope of the crisis and break in a life” (Bakhtin 1981: 248), because the contents recalled to memory and verbalised concern political and social upheavals that had serious consequences on the lives of the persons interviewed and led to serious personal crises. This article aims to investigate the narrative construction of the crisis years 1933 and 1938 in two interviews from the Israelkorpus, also considering material from questionnaires filled in by the interviewees some time before the interview. The analysis, carried out following the “close reading” method (cf. Deppermann 2001: 64) and with the toolkit of narrative and conversational analysis, reveals how the interviewees position themselves in relation to the crisis chronotopes of 1933 and 1938; it also highlights dates that condense those crisis chronotopes.