Body And Space As Media Of Cultural Memory In Rafik Schami's Novel Die Dunkle Seite Der Liebe

Since the second half of the 20th century,the propotion of migrants in the population in Germany has grown larger.While the immigrant inhabitants also bring their own culture of their origins to Germany,migration literature has become a culture phenomenon and is gradually valued in the German literature world and among the Germanists in different countries.In the current relevant research,the Germanists see connection in the works of the migration authors and their migration background and summarize the works as a description of their own existence in a foreign country.The present thesis selects Rafik Schami's german novel Die dunkle Seite der Liebe,with the aim of investigating the cultural memory of the novel and the media that express cultural memory in the context of memory research.With the development of globalization,migrants also show diverse characteristics.Thus,German culture has contacts with different cultures of others.However,the cultures of the migrants have never become part of the German native culture,but they are observed and evaluated as marginal cultures.In order to escape the barriers of the German perspective,migration authors like Rafik Schami try to write about his native culture.Schami reconstructs an oriental country,which is different from the version in the eyes of the Europeans.The second chapter of this work focuses on the important topics of migration literature in the context of globalization such as hometown,travel,memories,and forgetting.And the memory theory provides the basis for text analysis.Literature is a way for immigrant writers to resist oblivion when they are not in their homeland.Memory research provides the theoretical basis for analyzing this work.Then the thesis presents the temporal arrangement and the figure constellation in the novel Die dunkle Seite der Liebe.The novel gives up the linear narrative mode and uses collages and modular narrative methods to jump between different time strands.The past and present of the three generations alternate unchronologically,thus forming a complete history.The conflicts between the three generations of the two families are clearly evident in the jumping action,and thus narration becomes a kind of intertwined memory:the contradiction between generations of grandparents,parents,and grandchildren is rooted in society as a whole and its culture.Also,the construction of the novel becomes the presentation of cultural memory.This thesis explores the media that carry cultural memory in Schami's novel.The thesis selects two different media,body and space,and explains how cultural memory is expressed through the media.On the one hand,the body as a symbol of culturure is the most primitive and direct way through which society understands itself.The hammam culture in the countries of the Middle East plays an important role in creating the figures.At the same time,the prisons and punishment to the body is a trauma memory.On the other hand,the experience of space deepens the memory.The change of space also changes the memory between city and countryside.The countryside is a stronghold of ancestral patriarchal traditions and is also full of wars,clan conflicts and sexual taboos.In contrast,cities are beginning to move towards to modernization and heterogeneity,although gender equality and clan peace are still unreachable.The novel of Rafik Schami provides the german readers with a new perspective.The migrant writers do not need to write about their difficulty in integrating into Germany.But they look back upon their past and present and consider,how they can reconstruct their cultures.The novel recreates the Syrian city and rural society in the 20th century,it rebuilds the memory of three generations of two femilies through the body and the space of different forms.It is a diverse,heterogeneous Syria,where traditional values and modern development evolve parallel.