Displacement and Disorientation in a Narrative of Former Migrants from Germany to Palestine

The analysis of narratives, as a preferred method to index a speaker’s personal stance and social identifications, has been increasingly used in migration studies, since narration is central to the construction of both individual and collective identities. In consequence of the so-called ‘spatial turn’, recent studies stress the role of space and place in discourse, as space impacts language and its speaker. The category of ‘chronotope’ or ‘space-time’, first introduced by Bakhtin, will prove fruitful for a fine-grained linguistic analysis of the role of space in narratives. Against this background the chapter aims to investigate displacement and disorientation in a narrative from the so-called Israelkorpus, a (mostly) German language collection of interviews with German-speaking Jews, who emigrated from Central Europe to Palestine/ Israel mainly between 1933 and 1939. In my analysis, I firstly highlight the role of spatial orientation cues in the narrative and, secondly, show how they manage to convey the impression of displacement and disorien- tation the interviewees felt back then. Mapping the chronotopes and their alignments in the narrative allows the reader to analyse and interpret the way that the narrators situate their previous selves and the various revoked figures in the narrated story.