Faire parler la ville

Écritures berlinoises chez Cécile Wajsbrot

Abstract

For French writer Cécile Wajsbrot, the fall of the Berlin Wall opens up a new access to the traumatic past of the German capital – and above all to the palimpsest of the reunified city. In her anthology Berliner Ensemble (2015) and in her novel L’Île aux musées (2008), she lets the city speak by exposing the layers of the Berlin palimpsest. The narrator of Berliner Ensemble appropriates the city through walking, superimposing multiple perspectives to create a polyphonic structure. The plurality of voices is also one of the main strategies for giving voice to the experience of the wounds left by the city’s past. From this perspective, Berliner Ensemble enters into dialogue with L’Île aux musées. The narrative voice of the novel is conveyed by a collective of statues. In a movement of human decentring, this collective questions human consciousness and collective memory, thereby reconfiguring the urban space.