IchErzählung

Ich-Erzählung, or first-person narration, is a narrative perspective widely used in German-language literature. The form centers on a narrator who tells the story from the pronoun I (ich), often presenting events through their memories, thoughts, and subjective experience. The voice may belong to the story’s protagonist, a participant, or a narrated persona created by the author. The telling is characterized by immediacy and intimacy, but it also carries the limits of one consciousness: information is filtered through the narrator’s perspective.

A key feature of the Ich-Erzählung is its potential unreliability. The narrator’s statements may be biased, incomplete, or distorted by memory, emotion, or self-deception. This open-ended reliability invites readers to interpret events critically and to question how language and perspective shape meaning. The form can produce tension between what is told and what is shown, between inner experience and external reality.

In practice, the Ich-Erzählung is employed to explore psychological depth, character development, and personal or confessional material. It is common in coming‑of‑age narratives, autobiographical or memoir-like fiction, and other works that foreground subjective perception. The form contrasts with third-person narration, which tends to offer broader scope and distance. In German-language literary criticism, Ich-Erzählung is used to analyze voice, focalization, and the relationship between the narrator and the implied author, as well as issues of reliability and memory.