Framing the archive through autofiction: Christa Wolf's Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud and Natascha Wodin's Sie kam aus Mariupol

In recent decades, much German literature has engaged with questions of memory, often from an autobiographical perspective. This preoccupation with memory in German life writing, moreover, has become intimately connected with the archive, broadly understood as material traces of the past and relating frequently to the specific histories of National Socialism and the German Democratic Republic. This article argues that the significance of the archive as featured or thematized in literary texts parallels some of the key concerns of autofiction as a particular mode of life writing that challenges our assumptions about fact and fiction, self and other, and the knowability of the individual and the past. Focusing on Christa Wolf ’s Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010) and Natascha Wodin’s Sie kam aus Mariupol (2016) – two texts that can be described as autofictional – the article shows not only how the archive affects narratives about the past and the self, but how these narratives are constructed to affect our perception and understanding of the archive.