Veldenstein: A novel ; Sieving the Void: Forest, Fairy Tale, Forgetting (Critical essay)

This doctoral project interrogates the fragmentation of societal and family memory which bisects mid 20th century German history. It takes as its central themes those of inheritance and storytelling, and is an exercise in transforming the concerns of the artworks of Anselm Kiefer, rendering them as a twisting narrative of sentient forest, fairy tale, guilt and amnesia. The project consists of two parts: Veldenstein, a work of gothic historical fiction, and Sieving the Void: Forest, Fairy Tale, Forgetting, an accompanying critical essay. Both parts of the project seek to answer questions around the shifting roles played by ancestry, place and storytelling as instigators and repositories of trauma, and to demonstrate that the structure of biological inheritance can be imaginatively used to determine choices of form and content to address these. Veldenstein has an extensive cast, a mix of fictional and historical characters, including Hermann Göring and his younger brother, Albert. The novel shows the different trajectories of these and other major characters, with action set against a background of rising antisemitism in the years leading up to the First World War, and again during the post-Holocaust period of trial and retribution.