It is one of the peculiarities of the literary discourse of ‘coming to terms with the Nazi past’ in Germany and Austria that, certainly until the millennium, it functions largely without the voices of the victims, whether the survivors or their descendants. Indeed, it is a characteristic of even the most differentiated literary assessments of the Nazi legacy in the so-called ‘second generation’ that they circumvent an engagement with the victims’ perspective, except in the most abstract form. In contrast to this, the early 1980s saw the emergence of a German-Jewish literature that investigates the possibilities and conditions of Jewish existence in the former perpetrator countries by means of an intense engagement with its non-Jewish environment. This literature of a ‘second generation’ after the Holocaust operates within a double field of historical tension: on the one hand with respect to the history of its non-Jewish environment and on the other with respect to its own Jewishness in relation to the legacy of the Holocaust. Thomas Nolden, in his seminal study of this ‘young’ German-Jewish literature published in 1995, described this literature as a form of ‘concentric writing’, a term that describes the approach the German-Jewish writers take to the complex question of Jewish identity after the Holocaust. The central feature of this literature, Nolden argues, is that a traditional idea of Jewishness is no longer ‘given’ for these authors who are cut off from traditional identity both ‘by the history of assimilation of their predecessors, and more radically, by the exterminatory insanity of the National Socialists’. Furthermore, the experience of the Holocaust, transmitted by the suffering of their parents, occupies a paradoxical position in the self-understanding of these writers who see their lives as dedicated to the remembrance of their forebears’ suffering while also desiring to be free of a task that is experienced as an overpowering form of coercion. Thus the literature of the ‘second generation’ of Holocaust survivors both reflects, and reflects on, the contradictory psychological conditions of the children of the survivors.