Guilt and shame in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's "Der Verlorene". Coping Strategies of the Characters

Abstract or Introduction

In his novella, Treichel describes the life of a German family in the postwar years from the perspective of their youngest child. This life is characterized by the search for a son, Arnold, lost on the run, whose loss weighs heavily on the parents, but also by the search for a new identification in a society that has to bear heavily the legacy of the National Socialists. While in the course of the story this positioning gradually succeeds amidst many problems, the search for the lost son finally fails for good, despite exhausting all possibilities. Almost all the characters in the narrative are characterized by a feeling of guilt and shame; the causes of this are very diverse: a lost war in general, in particular a lost son, the lack of opportunity of parents to offer love and affection to their child, the greatest bias in the interpersonal sphere, an image of the world shaped by prejudice, the feeling of inadequacy.

The novella shows how the individual characters deal with this problem, how they can develop over time or how they are so caught up with guilt and shame that such development is not possible at all. This paper is concerned with the extent to which the main characters of the narrative in particular, namely the mother, father, and narrator, are determined by guilt and shame and how they deal with them.