On photography and memory in the works of Wilhelm Genazino, W.G. Sebald, and Gerhard Roth

In the literary texts of the last decades photographs have been reflected upon more insistently than ever before, both as media and as metaphors of memory - right up to the limits of memory. The distinction between memoria and post-memoria has stimulated the authors of various literatures to relate stories about the commemorative effects of photos, especially family photos, but also about the irreversible process of losing all of one’s personal connections with the past once the photograph’s references can no longer be identified. In the works of the German writers W. G. Sebald and Wilhelm Genazino, as well as of the Austrian writer Gerhard Roth, photography is a central issue, and their texts are sometimes combined with reproductions of photographic images. Time and again the blurred and defective way these photos are presented signalises the failure of the memory: images from the past, images of the deceased lose their shape and finally vanish