Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic

In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which Germans were not perpetrators, but victims: the Allied bombing campaign, the expulsions of "ethnic" Germans from the east, the mass rapes inflicted on German women, and the postwar internment and persecution of Germans. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Two key texts are W. G. Sebald's The Air War and Literature (1999) and Gunter Grass's Crabwalk (2002), but there are many others. The vast majority of these texts seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to depict the fate of "ordinary Germans" in an empathetic manner, seeking a balance German victimhood and German perpetration. This book of essays by leading scholars from the UK, the US, and Germany is the first in English to examine in detail the variety of these recent texts. An opening section on the 1950s - a decade of intense literary engagement with Germans as victims before the focus shifted in the 1960s to German perpetration - provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The longer second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s advent of the Berlin Republic and the coinciding shifts in perspective on the Nazi past, on questions of perpetration and victimhood, on the fates of ordinary Germans, and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation. Many of the works considered are among the best of contemporary German literature and are widely read in English translation. This volume will therefore interest not only the specialist but also the general reader (titles of texts and quotations are translated). Cultural historians, historians of the Holocaust, and comparative literature specialists will also find this book an invaluable resource and guide. ~~ STUART TABERNER is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society, and KARINA BERGER, B.A., M.St., is a Ph.D. candidate, both at the University of Leeds, UK.