Despite the compulsory exegeses of Marx conducted at universities in the GDR, which most poets completed, the work of the young Marx exerted a genuine creative fascination upon many of them, varying by gravity and intensity depending on the historical period. Bertolt Brecht, Hans Mayer, and Robert Havemann acted as mediators of Marx for the poets who emerged to dominate the lyric poetry of the GDR since the mid-1960s (Sarah Kirsch, Karl Mickel, Volker Braun, among others). Ernst Bloch’s most important work, „Das Prinzip Hoffnung“ (“The Principle of Hope”), which revolves around the utopian core idea of “the reconciliation of man and nature,” harkens back to the writings of the young Marx and can be regarded as central to the latter’s reception at the time. This is particularly evident in poems by Volker Braun and Karl Mickel, which will be considered here in more detail. Since the 1970s, however, socialist critique in poetry has increasingly been overlaid by a critique of civilization. This refocusing on the ‘globalist Marx,’ which had already been prepared by Karl Mickel’s poem „Der See“ (“The Lake”) (1963), has resulted in both the intensified resumption of Marxian / Blochian emblematics (Volker Braun) and a decided departure from any “principle of hope” (Günter Kunert). With postmodernism and the Wendezeit, lyrical insistence upon Marx seemed to have become obsolete. Yet along with the renaissance of nature poetry since the turn of the 21st century, Marx’s thinking – and particularly, the tradition of ‘Young Marx’ – has reemerged with new relevance to the “poetry of now” generation (Daniel Falb and others), who react critically to anthropogenic influence upon the climate and biosphere. In this context, the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ occupies a key position in contemporary poetological reflection as well as in the practice of writing.

According to a frequently encountered view, the family novel is not at all compatible with the modern phenomena of life. On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that such reproaches presuppose a trivialised genre that may be innovatively destroyed or renewed. In response to such reproaches, this article proposes a more general notion of family novel, denoting those narratives whose content and structure are essentially shaped by the relationship between characters in terms of intergenerational biological, cultural or material continuities or discontinuities. In addition, this article argues that the issues of intergenerational relationships still play a role. For instance, actual kinship without stable, affective relationships is an ongoing theme. However, there are Swiss German family novels in which the failure of establishing a strong emotional intergenerational relationship are narrated with a new relaxedness. Failing families or the renunciation of family attachment are no longer existential problems.

The contribution is based on the hypothesis that Charles Lewinsky’s novel “Melnitz” should be read as the first literary cultural and social history of Swiss Jews after legal emancipation. On the one hand, it highlights the magical realist figure of Uncle Melnitz, a revenant eyewitness whose existence can be traced back to the violent persecution of Jews during the Cossack Khmelnytskyi Uprising in the 17th century, and who, following the pattern of Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, repeatedly comments on events from the perspective of the Jewish persecutees. Through Melnitz’s commentaries, the generational history of the Meijer family is presented simultaneously as Swiss history and as a collective Jewish history of memory. The identity of the Jews in Switzerland, which is perceived stereotypically as homogeneous from the outside, is in this way continuously renegotiated in the novel between adaptation and self-assurance, such that the demarcation between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures becomes increasingly blurred.

The particular relevance of family in human life and experience, which is addressed in family novels, is also evident in sociological studies. In what way can these views complement each other? The text is meant as a contribution to discuss this question, starting by presenting some statistical data on the contemporary diversity of individual and collective family behaviors. They are summarized in five theses focusing on an elaborated, open understanding of human generativity, i.e. the individual and the institutional shaping of generational relationships. These generalizations allow to build a bridge to studies on the family novel. I postulate that the commonalities of family sociology and family novel can be seen in the critical dealing with notions of normality, the tense shaping of social relationships, and – consequentially – the dynamic search for personal and collective identities. These processes go hand in hand with experiences of ambivalence and practices to cope with them.

As this introduction and the following contributions will show, family in its many forms continues to be an essential element of social life as well as of literary plots. With regard to Swiss literature, the family in its diversity intersects with a multilingual corpus, opening up a new view of the relationship between social preconditions and literary reflection.