The paper examines in what way the German land and the German ethnic group appear according to modern Ukrainians, what is the embodiment of “Germanness” for our contemporaries. This can be found most fully by analyzing the oral narratives told in the memorate convention. Thus, methodological approaches developed within the framework of folklore studies, structural narratology and imagology are used in the research paper. The empirical basis of the research is 161 narrative-structured interviews, most of which were recorded and transcribed over the past three years by the author. The total volume of deciphered materials is about 800 pages. The first chapter, titled “Oral folk prose about Germany: historiographical and methodological aspects of the study”, examines the research conducted in the field of modern humanities, where narratology has become a fruitful approach in solving a wide range of problematic issues. It is noted that due to its universality, the oral narrative has become the research object in a number of social and humanitarian disciplines, such as history, psychology, linguistics, folklore studies, etc. An analysis of the fixation and research of folklore about Germany during the First and Second World Wars, post-war and modern period was carried out. If in the 1920s only the methods of collecting and processing material were outlined, in the 1940s and 1950s separate studies about the experience of contacts with Germans during the Second World War and about the folklore of Ukrainians taken abroad appeared, then in the last decades a number of interesting publications studying the narratives about the experience of star workers, concentration camp prisoners, immigrants, etc. emerged. Stories of people forcibly deported to Germany attract the attention of both oral historians and folklorists.
The method of recording and interpreting autobiographical prose is outlined. Thanks to the application of the structured narrative interview method, involving recording information on digital media, and then deciphering (transcribing) in accordance with the requirements to preserve the lexical, grammatical and syntactic features of the narrator’s speech, it was possible to record and use in the further study the autobiographical respondents’ stories of life which is somehow related to Germany.
In the second chapter, “Structural features of oral autobiographical narratives about Germany”, the syntax of the stories is investigated. The types of plots used by our storytellers are defined. Narratives about staying in Germany (contemporary experience of labor migration, education, tourism, as well as the experience of Ostarbeiter) are characterized by the use of fables about “distant lands” and the people inhabiting them. The opposition we/them is important here. Stories about the experience of contact with the Germans during the Second World War are built according to the following models: unjustified expectations about enemy Germans who demonstrate a humane attitude towards the local population, stories about miraculous salvation, stories contrasting the nobility of German soldiers with the savagery and cruelty of the Soviet “warrior-liberators”. The plot of “German” narratives is analyzed from the point of view of the pace of the story (according to J. Genette). It was found that the typical scenes covered in the most detail are the description of Germany, its nature, the beauty of German cities and towns, the typical features of representatives of the German people, their differences from Ukrainians. In the form of scenes, such episodes as the first stay in Germany, the first meeting with the Germans, their help, and the display of various cultural practices that distinguish them from Ukrainians are displayed. Only extended episodes are relevant for the semantics of an autobiographical narrative about Germany, because important events require a detailed storytelling. Some events are recounted succinctly, in the form of a summary. Pauses in the mentioned texts can be narrative, descriptive and meditative containing additional information consistent with the content of the main story. The narrative figure of ellipsis is the most difficult to interpret, because it is connected with the unpronounced. Regarding homodiegesis and heterodiegesis in the studied narratives, the material is represented mainly by homodiegetic narratives in stories about modern Germany and heterodiegetic narratives in stories about the experience of the Second World War. Among the features of the narration presentation, we emphasize the difference between the male/female text, the use of speech forms typical for folklore narration.
