Verena Boos's Blutorangen (2015): A German contribution to the literature of memory?

Abstract

The renewed interest in Spain’s recent past and the efforts of recovering historical memory has led to a considerable number of contemporary novels concerned with the Spanish Civil War, Francoism, and the Transition to democracy. Also other non-Spanish authors have currently taken up the topic, such as German writer Verena Boos in her debut novel Blutorangen (2015). This article argues that Blutorangen relates to the so-called literatura de la memoria not only on a formal level by using shifting points of view, flashbacks, and flashforwards, but also on the subject level by focusing on a multi-faceted depiction of the “Nationalist villain” (Hansen, 2011) as well as on the issues of guilt, forgetting and remembering.