"The East" as a Transit Space in the New Europe? Transnational Train Journeys in Prose Poems by Kurt Drawert, Lutz Seiler and Ilma Rakusa (Pre-published version)

Abstract

The past three decades, following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, have seen the development of a ‘European literature’ characterised by the emergence of transnational subjects and spaces. This also applies to a Europe traditionally defining itself by means of a frontier to the ‘East’. In German writing, this has been a more recent phenomenon than in other Central or Eastern European literatures, and is not restricted to ‘Migrantenliteratur’. In texts subverting East-West dichotomies by contemporary German-speaking writers with an ‘Eastern Bloc biography’, the train journey into the East emerges as a recurrent motif. The traveller encounters this East in Siberia, but also in various places or spaces in Central and Eastern Europe. Examples discussed here include poems and short narrative texts by Kurt Drawert, Lutz Seiler and Ilma Rakusa, which could be defined as prose poetry.My analysis, based on spatial concepts by Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault, will focus on movement in these texts, which tends to affect temporal and genre boundaries as much as those between self and Other. The train itself or the landscape travelled through becomes a transit space in which national borders and frontiers to the East are, at least temporarily, transcended.