ABSTRACT
The Final Journey, the original title of Gudrun Pausewang’s teenage novel Reise im August (1992) does not indicate the nature of the destination of that summer journey. The novel revolves round two types of journey, the physical journey of the central character, eleven-year-old Alice Dubsky, in a goods wagon to an unknown destination, and her mental voyage of self-discovery. The experiences of children have been not only been recalled, resignified and remapped in documentary writing, but are acknowledged by means of memorial stones and plaques. There is a reluctance in documentary accounts of children in the National Socialist period to dwell too long on death and trauma, so the field of German teenage literature from the 1970s dealing with the National Socialist period is characterized by what Stephens would describe as the ‘time-out’ text. Reise im August appears to deal with the present, a journey which lasts some twenty-four hours, but weaves in reflections on the past.
