Afrika iz pera V.G.Zebalda

Abstract

Writing his prose in the spirit of a postmodern understanding of the past, German writer Winfried Georg Sebald testifies to various discriminations and injustices throughout history. Sebald’s novels, in which he provides an overview of a large number of historical and social misfortunes, are in accordance with the moral imperative (Ricœur) that everyone, regardless of whether they were direct participants in an event or not, should testify of the suffering in (near or further) past. Although colonialism is not the primary theme in the works of the German author, the fates of the little people we read about in his novels point to the victims of the colonial order. The aim of this paper is to analyze the Belgian colonization of Africa in the novel The Rings of Saturn in the theoretical framework of postmodernism and postcolonialism in order to confirm that the main feature of Sebald’s poetics is witnessing, verbalizing injustice, and opposing ideologies that tend to swallow the narratives of the victims, in the desire to prevent repetition of inhumanity and destruction.