Verräumlichte Inklusions- und Exklusionsvorgänge in Abbas Khiders Roman „Der Erinnerungsfälscher“

[Machine translation] The German-Iraqi writer Abbas Khider, who won the Hilde Domin (2013), the Nelly Sachs (2017) and the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (2017), was arrested in Baghdad at the age of nineteen as a result of his political activism; after his release, he fled his home country in 1996, initially staying in various countries before settling in Germany in 2000. , Khider's newly published novel Der Erinnerungsfalscher (2022), which is partly autobiographical, focuses on the memoirs of refugee and writer Said Al-Wahid, who suddenly has to temporarily return from Berlin to Iraq due to his mother's serious illness. His past and memories of migration and the desired integration in Europe are spatialized in the novel, so that processes of inclusion and exclusion gain in concreteness and strength., Doubt about memory and pain are vividly represented by images of space (e.g. through a maze, holes and minefields), but in contrast to Schlögel's claim “Places are reliable witnesses, memories are flexible,” the novel also shows the unreliability of memory in their spatializations. This raises questions of identity, which include both the foreign homeland and Germany that has not yet become its own. Borders exist on several levels and are consolidated in color differences that are rooted in a black and white dichotomy. However, borders do not become a “place of encounter” (Karahasan), but a place of separation, which is concretized in the — bureaucratic — wall against which the main character clashes several times., Said's German passport finally appears to him as a “lifeline” (Khider), but it alienates the refugee from his homeland even more and further exacerbates his divided state of identity because the question of belonging is difficult for him to answer. The only effective anchoring in the novel is Said's apartment in Berlin, which he moves into with his German wife and child and means for him a “hiding place from the whole world [...], [a] small oasis and writing hut” (Khider): A multicultural and safe space of isolation, in which borders — in part — can be crossed, giving him space for a — albeit only laborious and precarious — solution to his isolation creates border conflicts.