Fiktionen des Krieges: Wolfgang Borchert und Serhij Zhadan
Fictions of war: Wolfgang Borchert and Serhij Zhadan

Summary/Abstract: Wars do not only consist of fighting with weapons, but they are massively reinforced by a discourse on signs and media. This also influences the function of literature insofar as it deals with wars. The novel “Internat” (German 2018) by the Ukrainian author Serhij Zhadan, which is set in the Donbass war in 2014/15, is compared with the work of the German post-war author Wolfgang Borchert. Both, Zhadan and Borchert, focus on an image of the respective war, constructed as the essential and existential. This is not about the specific historical process. Images and narratives illustrate the war´s misanthropy. They show how the violence of war develops from the interplay of truth and lies, with the consequence of a destruction that reaches into the total. At the same time it is experienced by the civilians in Zhadan’s novel as a fate that is barely comprehensible. With moments of humanity on both sides and the resistance against the fear that the initially passive teacher Pascha develops while walking through the “hell” of the city to save his nephew, “Internat” proves to be an anti-war novel. However, the course of the war cannot really be influenced by this behavior, and the fight against the invasion of an independent country remains legitimate.

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