La memoria e i luoghi nella narrazione di eventi a forte carica emotiva

The interplay of memory, remembering and narration can be clearly tackled in so-called biographical-narrative interviews, as speakers verbalize in the narrative of their own life story the memories, they by and by recall. In consequence of the so-called ‘spatial turn’, studies stress the role of space and place in discourse and in narratives, because space impacts language and its speaker; the category of ‘chronotope’ or ‘space-time’, first introduced by Bakhtin, proves fruitful for fine-grained linguistic analyses of the role of space in narratives. Against this background the paper aims to investigate the role of places in mnestic processing and in narration, analysing narratives from the so-called Israelkorpus, a (mostly) German-language collection of interviews with German speaking Jews, who emigrated from Central Europe to Palestine/Israel mainly between 1933 and 1939. In my analysis, I firstly highlight the role of places as «points of attachment for specific memorial content» (Casey 1993: 172), and, secondly, show different features of such «points of attachment», with special consideration of the role of places in recalling highly emotional and traumatic memories.