Martin Walser´s Double Entry Book-Keeping. The Construction and the Deconstruction of National Identity in His Late Works

The German writer Martin Walser (*1927) has over the recent years given rise to several debates in which German intellectuals discussed their views of the German 20th century past and their self-unterstanding as Germans. It is precisely because of their role as generators of discussions about German national identity that Walser´s late works were not paid appropriate attention to as self-sustained works of art. The German and Anglo-Saxon literary criticism has so far failed to describe the manner in which the national identity is constructed in Walser´s late works. Nor has it asked the question whether the national identity is the only identity paradigm Walser creates in his late works. This paper tries to fill this void. -This paper argues that Walser´s late works draw on two paradigms of personal identity. Walser seems to communicate the notion that anyone´s identity is in the first place determined by his/her pertinence to a certain ethnic and cultural body to a homogeneous nation. Such a person does not freely create his/her identity but is willingly or not assigned one. At the same time Walser appears to suggest that every person is free to create his/her own individual identity independent of existing meaning structures. Although this individual identity is created in human imagination or in literature first, it is in the end designed to become part of the respective person´s lebenspraxis. This paper shows in detail how these two different identity paradigms interfere in Walser´s late works