Versteckte Juden im Affenkäfig: Zu einer Erzählung von Robert Menasse im Negativbild Franz Kafkas

Abstract

In his story The End of the Winter of Starvation, Robert Menasse portrays a Jewish family that in 1944 survived the war in a monkey cage in the Amsterdam Zoo. The article uncovers the representation of historical matters, scrutinizes the narrative strategy that both strives to question the truth of memory and aims to reveal how ritualized memory-talk is. By interpreting the performance of memory in Menasse’s story, and by highlighting insights from animal studies, the intertextual negative of Franz Kafka’s story A Report to an Academy is revealed.