„Ich erzähle mich selbst“ oder Der Schriftsteller, der das Schreiben hört. Zu drei Büchern Peter Härtlings über die Austreibung
“I’m tellingmyself”, or, the Author who Hears the Writing. On Peter Härtling’s Three Books about Expulsion (Božena; Große, kleine Schwester; Reise

Summary/Abstract: The clearly structured short novel Božena [Bozena] (1994) by Peter HÄRTLING portrays the circuitous course of life of the female character Božena Kostka, who, before World War Two, had been employed by a German lawyer in Bohemia and therefore, after 1945, called a “Nazi whore” by the Czechs and deprived of her human dignity. HÄRTLING’s novel Große, kleine Schwester [The big, little sister] (1998) depicts the development of two female characters. Ruth and Lea Böhmer experience, about from World War One onwards, the changeable play of power rotation, escape and expulsion until, after some separations in the 1990s, they can at last live in Swabia “together alone”. His children’s book Reise gegen den Wind [A Trip Against the Wind] (2000) relates the episodes of Karla Orlowski’s escape from Brno across the border to Austria in 1945, an escape which gets her together with her nephew Bernd into tumultuous situations. The plastic and discriminately shaped characters of women dominate the epic actions of the three differing genres, while the vividness of the language takes, with much aesthetic demand, the biographical background of the texts to stage. HÄRTLING spent the years of his childhood and youth in Olomouc.

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