Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T14:47:16.973Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

15 - “Secondary Suffering” and Victimhood: The “Other” of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink's “Die Beschneidung” and Maxim Biller's “Harlem Holocaust”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Kathrin Schödel
Affiliation:
University of Erlangen, Germany
Stuart Taberner
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Karina Berger
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Get access

Summary

IT HAS OFTEN BEEN CLAIMED THAT until the 1990s there had existed a taboo, or at least strict discursive rules in German public discourse, regarding depictions of “Germans as victims,” which made it difficult for Germans to remember and mourn their own wartime suffering. According to this interpretation of the history of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), the taboo was finally lifted in the years following German unification, allowing for the slow emergence of a long-neglected, more differentiated account of the experiences of “normal” Germans during the Nazi period, which is still in need of elaboration today. In this chapter, I examine this version of the history of German public memory as a construct that is closely linked to contemporary discourses of German identity but which also relies on complementary constructions of its “Other.” The obvious counterpart to the apparent new openness of the memory of National Socialism are other forms of public memory, especially the seemingly simplistic and moralistic memory of the Holocaust associated with the generation of '68. Yet I argue that the complementary Other created in recent debates about the need for greater differentiation in German memory discourse is often a particular construction of Jewish identity. To explore the connection between German “secondary suffering” — that is, the notion of a struggle with the memory of German guilt, and calls for a more complex approach to remembering National Socialismand a problematic view of Jewish identity, I examine two very different short stories: Bernhard Schlink's “Die Beschneidung” (The Circumcision, 2000) and Maxim Biller's “Harlem Holocaust” (1990).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×