More than ten years after the fall of the Wall Vergangenheitsbewältigung is out of favor with most Germans. The unified country, it seems, requires a self-definition in which the Holocaust no longer plays a central role. Fundamental to these efforts is the desire to establish Germany's normalcy as one democratic nation among others. Leading politicians such as Secretary of State Joschka Fischer envision a Germany that is mindful of its past yet at the same time a self-confident member of the new Europe. Coming to terms with the past was a West German project of the 1970s and 1980s, to a significant degree propelled by the antagonism between members of different generations and proponents of different political convictions. The GDR, by contrast, claimed an anti-fascist tradition and rejected responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich altogether. Yet Germany's Nazi history continues to impel writers to represent this past in literature and in essays. Since the early 1990s a number of authors have commented on this topic from a post-unification perspective. Among them are Günter Grass, who insists that writing in Germany will continue to be writing after Auschwitz. Martin Walser, one of his opponents in this argument, believes that Germans have the right not to be incessantly confronted with Auschwitz. Yet others, such as Peter Schneider, take the German past as their point of reference as they explore postunification Germany from the perspective of East and West Germans as well as the many foreigners who live on both sides of the former Wall.