‘DIE SOGENANNTEN KLEINEN LEUTE’: MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY AND THE IMPLICATED SUBJECT IN EVA MENASSE'S DUNKELBLUM

ABSTRACT Set in the fictional Austrian border town of Dunkelblum in the historically momentous summer of 1989, Eva Menasse's novel Dunkelblum (2021) is a polyphonic narrative recounting stories of the town's ‘sogenannten kleinen Leute’ and revolving around the dark core of a Nazi‐era atrocity. In this article, I analyse Dunkelblum as both a mirror of and contributor to recent approaches to the memory of the Holocaust and other traumatic events and explore the novel through the lens of Michael Rothberg's concepts of multidirectional memory and the implicated subject. After examining the way in which the novel's spotlight on cultural memory creation and subversion of literary genre tropes prepare a fertile ground for a consideration of Rothberg's ideas, I identify Dunkelblum ’s border setting as a site of multidirectional memory that highlights the productive potential but also the difficulties of this approach. I demonstrate how the stories of Dunkelblum's inhabitants present a wide array of characters occupying positions of complex implication and argue that this focus on the implicated subject shows that it takes a village to commit and cover up a crime and to perpetuate the structures that enabled that crime into the present day.