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Original scientific paper

https://doi.org/10.15291/gem.4082

„But where could one go?“ Intercultural Spaces in Fred Wander’s Refugee Novel Hôtel Baalbek (1991)

Stefam Hermes ; University Duisburg-Essen


Full text: german pdf 242 Kb

page 37-54

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Full text: english pdf 242 Kb

page 37-37

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Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which intercultural spaces are depicted in Fred Wander’s autobiographically tinged novel Hôtel Baalbek
(1991). In this context, it is of particular importance that the text takes
up various positively connoted elements of the mediterranist discourse,
but turns them into the negative in order to illustrate the catastrophic
situation of its protagonists: At the beginning of the 1940s, they are on
the run from Hitler’s regime of terror and have ended up in Marseille,
where they desperately and mostly in vain try to continue their journey
to America. In view of this, it makes sense that the novel varies a series
of not least tourist topoi and motifs in such a way that hardly anything
remains of the promise of the intercultural.

Keywords

Fred Wander, literature of exile, intercultural spaces, Mediterranean Sea, Marseille

Hrčak ID:

287884

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/287884

Publication date:

21.12.2022.

Article data in other languages: german

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