Shadows that Beget: Autobiographical Fiction, Memory and Fragmentation of the Self in “Muttersterben” and “Schattenfroh”

Abstract

This paper examines the convergence of autobiographical fiction, memory, and the fragmented self in Michael Lentz’s Muttersterben (2025) and Schattenfroh (2025); works that radically and fundamentally metamorphosed as well as challenged the boundaries of self-representation and narrative structure, especially in contemporary literature. Positioned within a postmodern macrocosm, predominantly marked by ontological instability and futility, Lentz’s works inhabit a liminal space between autobiography and fiction, oscillating between personal confession and literary performance. Muttersterben is a reflection of the protagonist and Lentz’s intimate confrontation with maternal and individual loss, while Schattenfroh expounds this devastation into an expansively surreal metafictional exploration in which Niemand is imprisoned to inscribe his “brainfluid” into existence. In both of these works, Lentz deconstructs the “autobiographical pact”, transforming writing into an act of remembrance as well as mourning, that simultaneously constructs and negates the self. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of the ethics of self-insertion/narration (Butler, Derrida), Postmemory (Hirsh), and Melancholia (Kristeva), this research situates Lentz’s writings into archives of grief, dispersed into language, form, and narrative performance. The focus would be on showcasing the paradoxical nature of loss as both an impetus of grief and expression, and the very force that disrupts coherence, leading to a rupture of discontinuity despite verbal excess, since giving an account of oneself, however thickly or thinly veiled, is constitutive of absence, belatedness, and lack. This paper contends that the aforementioned works resist closure, challenge fidelity of representation, and posit writing in loss. By relying on grief, individual as well as collective, and using it as an act of aesthetic, narrative, and linguistic invention, Lentz tries to reconstruct memory and self from ruins.