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About the Perpetrator’s Testimony in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde Uncovering the Linguistic and Discursive Devices

GIMÉNEZ CALPE, A. (2020): SOBRE EL TESTIMONIO DEL PERPETRADOR EN “FLUGHUNDE” DE MARCEL BEYER. DESENMASCARANDO SUS DISPOSITIVOS LINGÜÍSTICOS Y DISCURSIVOS. REVISTA DE FILOLOGÍA ALEMANA, 28, 91-105.

In the novel Flughunde, published in 1995, Marcel Beyer, a third-generation author born in 1965 and who therefore did not directly experience the Nazi period or the post-war era, articulates a fictional story based on a series of historical facts related to the death of Magda and Joseph Goebbels’children in which notions on the reliability of witnesses, fundamentally when these are perpetrators, are addressed. The objective of the article is to analyse how the novel portrays the representation of the perpetrator, as well as to uncover the discursive strategies of the text in order to expose the discourse of the perpetrator, who attempts to hidehis responsibility in the crimes committed during Nazism.