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Abstract
Basing on the image of Volhynia in the works of a contemporary German writer Hans Ulrich Treichel, the paper analyzes the construct of the German-Ukrainian borderland, which emerged within the framework of the diaspora model. The paper focuses on how the Ukrainian-German borderland, along with its characteristic connotations of ethno-cultural and mental borders, is conceptually and aesthetically interpreted in Treichel’s texts. The specificity of the image of Volhynia in Treichel’s texts is to no small degree determined by its being mediated by the memories of the writer’s father, a Volhynian German who, during the World War II, first moved to Poland, a country which by that time had been occupied by the Germans, and thereupon, together with his young wife, a native of one of the German colonies located on Polish territory, fled from the advancing Soviet army to West Germany. The impact of their traumatic war and getaway experience on the reconstructed image of their lost homeland is an important aspect of the research carried out in the paper. At the same time, the study also touches upon the mental maps of Eastern Europe, which left their mark on both the topography depicted in the texts, and the construction of individual and collective identities.
References
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