Introduction

AS THIS VOLUME AMPLY DEMONSTRATES, the explosion of recent interest in “German wartime suffering” is but the latest manifestation of contemporary Germany's often tortuous attempts since 1945 to define its relationship to National Socialism along a continuum that has German perpetration at its opposite pole. A recent feature of this multifaceted “memory work” has been a particularly intense preoccupation across a wide range of cultural and historical texts with the everyday fate and the choices faced by the German population at large in the Third Reich.

The literary arena since 1989–90 has witnessed a burgeoning trend in “life-writing,” that is, biographies, memoirs, and diaries, many of which have been published posthumously. Since the turn of the millennium, in particular, there has been a renaissance in “family” or “generational narratives” (either “straight” or “fictionalized” reconstructions of family genealogies) dealing with the problematic heritage of the Nazi past and its transgenerational transmission, precisely at a time when the cohort of eyewitnesses is passing away. In certain cases, of which Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders (In My Brother's Shadow, 2003) and Ulla Hahn's Unscharfe Bilder (Blurred Images, 2003) are good examples, the relationship is between the wartime generation and their children, many of whom have a history of political activism in the 1960s, on which they also reflect. Other texts focus on experience across three generations, such as Stephan Wackwitz's Ein unsichtbares Land (An Invisible Country, 2003) or Tanja Dücker's Himmelskörper (Heavenly Bodies, 2003).