Zurück nach Hannover. Ehemalige MigratInnen jüdischer Herkunft erzählen

This study is based on oral narrations from two corpora: the so called “Israel-Korpus” collected by Anne Betten and collaborators (Emigrantendeutsch in Israel, in: Archiv für Gesprochenes Deutsch), and the corpus of interviews with ‘Kinder’ from the Kindertransport gathered by me in 2017 (Flucht und Emigration nach Großbritannien, in: Archiv für Gesprochenes Deutsch). Certain of these narrations feature trips of the interviewees back to the city Hannover. The aim of the study is to analyse these narrations, which in fact vary considerably, not only because of the different ages of the interviewees and their different degrees of familiarity with the city, but also as a consequence of their different individual approaches to getting back in touch and elaborating the past. Recent studies stress the role of space and place in discourse, as space impacts language and its speakers (s. Keating 2015 for a survey of the ‘spatial turn’). In the examples in this article precise memories tend to concentrate on a very small number of places; there is a certain vagueness in the recollections and this is reflected in the linguistic construction of space, which tends to be fragmentary or can only be reconstructed with the help of others.