Le tissage de la mémoire La captivité des frères Wolfgang d’Augsbourg à Alger

Abstract

Among the surviving German-language accounts of captivity, the story of the fate of two young Augsburg artists, the Wolfgang brothers, taken captive by Algerian corsairs on their way back from England and brought to Algiers is particularly remarkable. Thanks to new documents published in this same review by Gérard van Krieken it is now possible to determine the exact date of the capture and thus to reassess the story. The analysis of the correction concerning the date of the capture reveals the essential role played by the particular type of memoria that characterises the narrative, written and published almost 80 years after their return from Algiers by the son of one of the brothers, himself already aged.