‘Luoghi del tempo’, ricordi ed emozioni nelle interviste del corpus Emigrantendeutsch in Israel

Abstract

The aim of this contribution is the examination of the role of places as an anchorage of memories in the so-called Israelkorpus, a corpus of narrative interviews in German, investigating places also in the light of their function within the mnestic and narrative elaboration, thus also linked to the emotional dimension (Leonardi et al. 2023). The spatial dimension plays a fundamental role in the corpus; the people interviewed, in fact, guided by the interviewers, narrate their own life stories, marked by anti-Semitic policies, and deeply linked to places. Common stages are in fact the emigration from Germany or Austria (the old Heimat) and the new beginning in another country (the new Heimat). Our approach is part of the renewed interest in the spatial dimension, already present in the tradition of the loci memoriae and only revived in recent decades as a consequence of the so-called spatial turn, although still underestimated compared to the temporal dimension (Leonardi et al. 2023). We also consider that places are constituted by the people who inhabit them and through their dynamic networks of social relations (Massey 1995) and that places favour association with other memories. The aim of our contribution is on the one hand to focus on the correlation between memory, memories and places (Leonardi et al. 2023), and on the other hand to highlight, thanks to a quantitative-qualitative approach, its close relationship with emotions, since during the re-emergence of memories the people interviewed thematise and express their emotions often anchored to places. Starting from a categorisation of the places in the corpus (Brambilla/Flinz 2019, p. 178; Flinz/Ruppenhofer 2021, p. 47), carried out for the purpose of mapping the places in the Israelkorpus in the light of their various functions in the corpus (mnestic, narrative, emotional processing, etc.) we intend to analyse the 'places linked to the cultural-historical period' (Brambilla/Flinz/Luppi 2023) in the IS corpus. The analysis will be carried out with the tools of corpus analysis, narratology and conversation analysis, integrating quantitative and qualitative methods (mixed methods).