ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses two contrasting French-language narratives: Evelyne Le Garrec and Maren Sell, which are written towards the end of the 1970s by children of the wartime generation who thematize the difficulties of speaking of Germany as home. As a result, in a conscious effort to distance themselves from their German origins and heritage, both narrators portray themselves as exiled from Germany. The chapter examines the ways in which Le Garrec and Sell deploy terms of displacement and metaphors exile in order to construct their national identities and origins and deal with the parental heritage of Nazism, collaboration, and the Holocaust in their La Riverallemande de ma memoire and Mourir d'absence. It argues that the narrators' displacement is a strategy for criticizing or rejecting the parental Nazi legacy of extermination. The representation of a female rejection of Germany through terrorism or exile is therefore perpetuating in a refusal to bequeath the Nazi legacy to a future generation.
