The child witness and the child reader in the works of Mehrnousch Zaeri-Esfahani. Reading “testimonies” in the school environment

Abstract 0

In two recently published children’s books, the Iranian-born author Mehrnousch Zaeri-Esfahani narrates her experience of the Islamic Revolution, life under the authoritarian regime, and her later exile in Germany. While Zaeri-Esfahani describes the first of these two works, 33 Bogen und ein Teehaus ( 33 Arches and a Teahouse) as an autobiography, the second, Das Mondmädchen ( The Moongirl), is labeled as a Roman in German. This article aims to explore the modalities of bearing witness that are made visible in these two narrative forms. Concretely, this means examining, on the one hand, how the author uses the term Zeugin (witness), and, on the other, how scholarship on testimony can be used to analyze both the texts and peritexts of her work. The article follows these two approaches by studying in detail the connection between first-person narration and an implied collective, the possibility of bearing witness through fiction, the question of the addressee and, especially, of the role of young readers and their potential “responsibility” as an audience.