“Aquis Submersus. Fact and Fiction in the Literary Afterlife of the Gelting Bay Death Sentences”

This article turns the issue’s attention to contemporary German fiction as it analyses Jochen Missfeldt’s (2006) novel, Steilküste. Ein See- und Nachtstück. The novel deals with the so-called ‘Gelting Bay Death Sentences’, the historical case of three young marines of the German Reichsmarine who were sentenced to death for desertion and executed on a warship in Gelting Bay on 10 May 1945, when the war was already over. By zooming in and out of space and time, by focalizing through different protagonists and mixing fact with fiction, documentary realism with lyrical evocations of the natural setting, cultural references, symbolic associations and even phantasmagorical elements, the novel transforms the enchanting natural ‘marine’ setting of Gelting Bay into an allegorical ‘theatrum memoriae’. Beneath the present peaceful water line, an ongoing transgenerational narrative of guilt is revealed covering a period of time that stretches back into Germany's colonial past on the one hand, and into post-1945 Germany on the other.