THE CENTRAL QUESTIONS OF THIS STUDY deal with the individual's relationship to or impact on political, social, and economic history and the concomitant ethical implications of individual and collective responsibility. This chapter examines Ingeborg Drewitz's development as a novelist in terms of the ethical constructs she explores and how they relate to her characters' attempts to understand their place within any number of historical narratives. Two of her novels in particular, Gestern war heute (1978) and Eis auf der Elbe (1982), examine the positioning and self-positioning of individuals within their historical present with a consistency and intensity not found in her earlier or later novels. Beginning with Oktoberlicht (October Light) in 1969, Drewitz wrote four novels that concentrated specifically on female characters and their experiences, but it was not until Gestern war heute that she systematically and thoroughly began to treat her characters' perception of their historical present.

Drewitz attempts in her novels to illustrate how individuals are placed and place themselves in history and how we use these understandings to map what Margaret Urban Walker has called a “geography of responsibility.” In particular, they show how we do so in a world in which the boundaries of the communities in which we live — through two world wars, several other global conflicts (such as the Vietnam War, armed conflicts in the Middle East, the coup in Chile, etc.), and the broad expansion of the mass media — have become unclear and beyond the ability of most individuals to grasp.