AT HOME IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE: BILINGUALISM AND LANGUAGE MIXTURES IN THE TEXTS OF RADEK KNAPP

Abstract

The writers with the so-called migration background are among those people who have undergone a dramatic change of culture and language as migrants and whose curriculum vitae is shaped by this change between languages and ways of life. The new language allows access to a new, different culture, thus also access to a new cultural identity and – last but not least – to a new reading public, which in the case of literary creation can be of crucial importance because the writers deliberately decide on a new addressee group. Although one mostly sees and acknowledges the most important identity marker in language, German as a literary medium of expression and publication in the case of transcultural writers does not establish homogeneous national identities, but fulfills the function of a transit space, a zone, a transcultural space of interpenetration and interweaving the cultural as well as the transformation of national affiliations and cultural identity. The texts of migrant authors reflect the importance of dealing with two languages because the bilingualism of migrants, often in the context of cultural identity, plays a role in migrant literature. The writers try to bring their own bilingualism into the texts, where often both cultures and languages co-exist. In the presentation selected texts are subjected to an analysis by the Polish-Austrian writer Radek Knapp. The article explores the question of where and how bilingualism and language mixtures manifest themselves in the individual texts of Knapp.