![]() I smelled the sourness of my own breath and felt her fresh sweat as she held me, and didn't know where to look. I wasn't much taller than she was, I could feel her breasts against my chest. "Hey, kid," she said, startled, "hey, kid"-and took me in her arms. When she straightened up, she saw I was crying. Then she took my pail and sent a second wave of water across the walk. She swung her arm, the water sluiced down across the walk and washed the vomit into the gutter. I took the other one, filled it, and followed her through the entryway. "Get that one!" There were two pails standing by the faucet she grabbed one and filled it. The woman turned on the tap, washed my hand first, and then cupped both of hers and threw water in my face. Wood was stacked in the courtyard in an open workshop a saw screamed and shavings flew. ![]() Up above there were lines strung from window to window, loaded with laundry. The woman seized my arm and pulled me through the dark entryway into the courtyard. When rescue came, it was almost an assault. ![]() I leaned against the wall of the building, looked down at the vomit around my feet, and retched something clear and sticky. My mouth was suddenly full, I tried to swallow everything down again, and clenched my teeth with my hand in front of my mouth, but it all burst out of my mouth anyway straight through my fingers. That was another thing that had never happened to me before. I woke up every morning with a dry mouth and the sensation that my insides were in the wrong place and too heavy for my body. Even if I sat down at the table hungry, I soon felt queasy. When I was faced with stairs either at home or at school, my legs would hardly carry me. I'd been feeling weak for days, in a way that was completely new to me. That's where I'd thrown up on the way home from school one day the previous October. The first time I ventured outside, it was to go from Blumenstrasse, where we lived on the second floor of a massive turn-of-the-century building, to Bahnhofstrasse. As dusk came one evening in February, there was the sound of a blackbird singing. I saw sky, sun, clouds, and heard the voices of children playing in the courtyard. January was warm, and my mother moved my bed out onto the balcony. Things didn't start to improve until the new year. As the old year darkened and turned colder, I got weaker and weaker. It started in the fall and lasted until spring. In this way, the paper shows that the different behaviors in which they confront and remember the past, exemplify the contrast between the war generation to which Hanna belongs and Michael’s postwar generation.When I was fifteen, I got hepatitis. The last section will analyze Memory Contests and Affective Memory Icons according to the theory applied by Fuchs with the purpose of determining how the characters deal with the past when they are forced to remember by the appearance of said icons. The second section will discuss the importance and influence of trauma in their identity by focusing on why it appears and the consequences that it has in their behavior. In the first one, the characters are examined following Marc Augé’s figures of forgetting which are “remembering the past”, “suspense” and “new beginning” while stressing the difference between the two characters. Thus, the analysis is divided in three sections. The different methods in which they confront the past, exemplify the contrast between the war generation, to which Hanna belongs, and Michael’s postwar generation. The aim of this paper is to explore these characters’ memories of German history by bearing in mind the generational gap that separates the two and analyze how it affects their perspectives. The story mediates between past and present by focusing on the relationship between two persons who belong to different generations, Michael and Hanna. A marvelous example of one of this novels is The Reader written by Bernhard Schlink, which gives great importance to the German guilt. For this reason, we can find many movies and literature based on the war but also on the years following the post-war, which helps us understand the actions of the different generations. The Second War World had a huge impact on German society and left its trace in the cultural history of the country.
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