ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connections between remembrance and maternal agency, using Himmelskorper by Tanja Duckers as a case study. Interweaving a coming-of-age story with reflections on family memory, this novel raises compelling questions about the relationship between remembrance, maternal performativity, and agency. Family narratives also function as 'genealogical critiques' of family relations, unmasking the mundane gestures through which they are consolidated over time, through domestic rituals and memory practices. The intergenerational focus of such novels reveals motherhood to be a 'constituted social temporality structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this "ground". The chapter discusses the family narratives which expose this groundlessness, by elucidating the role played by socio-historical forces in the construction of maternal meaning and the experience of maternity, they make it possible to envisage a restructuring of the Symbolic order and the maternal models that it perpetuates.
