„Sotto una tomba d’acqua“

Alpenseen zwischen Solastalgie und Ökokritik in zwei Romanen der Gegenwartsliteratur

Abstract

The essay examines the multifaceted aspects of a poetics of water in two docu-fictions: Marco Balzano's Resto qui (2018) and Susanne Huber's Und der See schweigt (2018). Both texts make an alpine mountain lake the setting for a family tragedy. In this sense, the contribution discusses how the characteristics of water contribute to intertwining collective and individual traumas while addressing both the memory of the world wars and the radical consequences of environmental destruction in the Alpine region. Building on approaches from ecocriticism, mountain studies, and space semiotics, the contribution focuses on the question of how these two issues are interconnected through the reference to water as a hydraulic force, metaphor, element of the environment, and agent of the narrative. Initially, the significance of the alpine lake on the threshold of modernity is illuminated. Following this, the contribution explores how the lake allows for the embodiment of loss and absence in the text between solastalgia and anti-space, before finally addressing from an intermedial perspective how postcards, photos, and maps in the text serve to make the dimension of destruction comprehensible.