,,dass gestern besser werden würde als morgen je gewesen war": Zur Kodierung von Trauma in Jan Costin Wagner's Kimmo-Joentaa-Romanen

Abstract

This thesis investigates a series of crime novels by German author Jan Costin Wagner. The series revolves around Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa who in the course of the series tries to deal with the loss of his wife. The focus of my analysis is the encoding of trauma in the novels. The foundation is constituted by the definition of trauma that psychotraumatologists Fischer/Riedesser provide. They understand trauma as a shock that influences one’s understanding of the Self and the world around us. I claim that Wagner discusses the possibility of processing a traumatic event by implementing fragmented structures and characters in his texts. These fragments are then compensated for by structuring elements. Wagner, I conclude, thus builds up an antithetic construction and makes trauma a structuring scheme in his series. My reading is done against the backdrop of 20th and 21st century crime literature. The goal is placing Wagner within the genre that up until recently was divided between the notions of the classical and the anti-crime novel.