Memory, implication and moral injury in the work of Vasilii Grossman and Heinrich Böll

This thesis compares the work of the Soviet-Jewish author Vasilii Grossman and the West German Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll in the context of memory studies. It particularly analyses these authors’ fictional representations of the Stalinist and National Socialist regimes, predominantly in texts written after 1945. In contrast to traditional approaches to the study of post-atrocity fiction that focus on depictions of victimhood and psychoanalytic notions of trauma, this project highlights the need to consider the ways that literature thematizes morally ambiguous experiences of historical violence that do not sit comfortably into categories of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’. To do so, the thesis critically draws on and develops two theoretical prisms through which to compare Grossman’s and Böll’s works. First, the concept of ‘implication’, which denotes ambiguous and indirect forms of involvement in structural violence (Rothberg 2019). Second, the notion of ‘moral injury’, which highlights the psychological consequences of committing, witnessing or failing to prevent an act that transgresses the individual’s personal moral code (Litz et al. 2009; Pederson 2021). These lenses provide a transformational means of studying Grossman’s and Böll’s literary approaches by elucidating their underappreciated focus on reckoning with ambiguous types of association with historical violence. On the one hand, they highlight the authors’ shared preference for multi-vocal narratives that emphasize the complexity of individual perspectives on the past. On the other hand, they show the writers’ similar broader conceptualizations of memory, which cast remembrance of as an ever-evolving, critical task that begins with the individual. Overall, the analysis reveals not only fresh insights into Grossman’s and Böll’s works, but also new avenues for broader comparison between post-National Socialist German and post-Stalinist Russian literatures and for the study of memory literature across contexts.