| This dissertation examines literary representations of family and nation and the intersection between these two concepts in the metaphor of the nation-as-family in the works of four twentieth-century East-Central European writers: Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, and Ingeborg Bachmann. It is a study of the ways in which social and political crises of the nation and empire, such as the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the rise of extreme nationalism, the Second World War, and totalitarianism, impact family life and familial relationships, and how this impact is represented within the domestic space.;Roth, Grass, Kundera, and Bachmann reflect on issues of nationalism and imperialism in the twentieth century in various representations of domestic crises. In their writings, individual families undergo various internal crises expressed as domestic conflicts between husband and wife, tense paternal or maternal relationships, resistance and challenge to paternal authority, or the loss of the family as a home and site of identity. In all the novels examined in this dissertation, but especially in those written by Roth and Grass, domestic crises intersect with historical crises in such a way that the family appears as the recipient of conflicts of war and nationalism. However, unlike Roth and Grass, Kundera and Bachmann show that the family is not only a theater for the representation of historical crises, but also the instrument through which the power and violence of war, nationalism, and totalitarianism are expressed and acted out. Thus, in Bachmann's view, the violence of nationalism and war that one nation unleashes against another nation arises primarily from a certain power dynamic that exists within the realm of the family, between a man and a woman.;In different ways, Roth, Grass, Kundera, and Bachmann underscore the complicity of the family in the perpetuation of violence in society. However, these writers also establish the family as the site where this violence can be opposed and new moral alternatives can be envisaged. |
