WOLFGANG BORCHERT: BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT, OEUVRE, AND PSYCHOPOETICS—ON THE FORMATION OF EXPRESSIVE MINIMALISM

Abstract

This article reinterprets Wolfgang Borchert’s post-war prose through a psychopoetic lens, arguing that his much-remarked “expressive minimalism” emerges not as mere stylistic economy but as a functional system for representing traumatized consciousness. Building on narratological and translation-oriented approaches to short fiction, the study integrates biographical context (war injury, imprisonment, terminal illness), an overview of the oeuvre with emphasis on short prose and the play Draußen vor der Tür, and a close reading of “Das Brot” and “Die Küchenuhr.”

Methodologically, the paper proposes an operational set of psychopoetic markers—internal monologue, free indirect discourse, pause/silence, focalization shifts, ellipsis/parcellation, and subtext—which together encode a rhetoric of restraint. The readings show how Borchert’s lexical parsimony, syncopated punctuation, and tightly focalized perspective redistribute affect from overt statement to structural gaps, thereby constructing ethical attention to the ordinary and the wounded. Borchert’s expressive minimalism is best understood as a cognitive-affective strategy forged by embodied wartime experience and oriented toward a pacifist poetics of witness.