Bücher von Andrea Hammel

«Dr. Laima Vince Sruoginis, an established author, academic, and life-long part of the North American Lithuanian diaspora, courageously faces Lithuania's difficult historical legacy in her ground-breaking book. She researched her community's refugee ancestors, drawing both from personal interviews and dusty academic sources, confronting uncomfortable truths.» (Philip S. Shapiro, President, Remembering Litvaks, Inc.) As World War II ended, refugees fled Soviet-occupied Lithuania, finding shelter in the displaced persons camps of Europe. By 1949, most had emigrated to North America. They brought with them opposing narratives about the Nazi occupation (1941-1944) when 95 percent of Lithuania's Jewish community was annihilated. Trauma narratives were passed down to the second and third generations through collective memory. Through postmemory, cultural memory, and trauma theory, Vanished Lands analyzes literary works by North American Jewish and Lithuanian writers who speak over the silence of decades, seeking answers.

This book is the ¿rst comparative study of the novels written by ¿ve German-speaking women ¿ Anna Gmeyner, Selma Kahn, Hilde Spiel, Martina Wied and Hermynia Zur Mühlen ¿ who had to ¿ee National Socialist Central Europe. Gmeyner, Spiel, Wied and Zur Mühlen found refuge in Britain and thus added ¿ together with male colleagues such as Stefan Zweig and Robert Neumann ¿ an important but rarely investigated new dimension to the British literary landscape. The aim of this study is to reassess the women refugee writers¿ narrative strategies and integrate their work within feminist literary studies. The author investigates the ¿ve writers¿ narrativisation of everyday life, used to subvert the dominant discourse, and their portrayal of the intersection between class, racial and gender oppression. She also shows their innovative ways of picturing the gendered tension between the experiences of exile and exile as a modernist metaphor as well as their search for ways to refute the Nationalist Socialist rewriting of history. The book situates the novels within the theoretical discussions surrounding exile studies, social history and women¿s writing.