ABSTRACT
The introduction situates the book within the field of literary memory studies, serves to coin the notions of ‘meta-memory’ and ‘generation’, and offers a brief overview of the book’s general structure. It starts out by describing general tendencies in contemporary society and culture with regard to World War II memory, highlighting its continued and multifaceted presence. Subsequently, the author sketches seminal developments within the postwar literary assessment of this memory, in order to frame the emergence of meta-memory as a new tendency within this assessment. Meta-memory, so Lensen states, is marked by an avid reflection on the conditions of contemporary remembering, which is marked by temporal and generational remove. He clarifies that these conditions are not merely explored at the level of content by the respective authors, but that their implications are manifest in their poetics as well. Lensen stresses that the emergence of fictions of meta-memory is to a certain extent bound to the coming-of-age of a new generation of authors, yet he does not tie it to this group and views it rather as a widely-carried shift that takes place against the background of the rapidly changing political and cultural landscape of the past decades.
