Eine Straße des Ankommens und Anfangens: European Spaces in Barbara Honigmann’s Strasbourg

Barbara Honigmann’s autobiographical texts about Strasbourg, principally Chronik meiner Straße (2015), inscribe her search for home in an ever-changing Europe. Honigmann’s insistence on the constancy of change among the need for stability lies at the core of any understanding of contemporary Europeanness. Such emphases illustrate new open, heterogeneous conceptions of European identity that have become expressly part of the European project. Honigmann’s exploration of such issues in her adopted home of Strasbourg uses the location as a European city par excellence, contrasting the historical-symbolic site praised by official European discourses with its more complex contemporary realities, including multilingualism. As her texts on Strasbourg offer counterweight to political discourses, feminism and Judaism also come into play. W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), which depicts an unending search for home in a fixed but lost past, serves as a contrast to Honigmann’s positions.