Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 W. G. Sebald and German Wartime Suffering
- 2 The Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald, Gert Ledig, and the Allied Bombings
- 3 Expulsion Novels of the 1950s: More than Meets the Eye?
- 4 “In this prison of the guard room”: Heinrich Böll's Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939–1945 in the Context of Contemporary Debates
- 5 Family, Heritage, and German Wartime Suffering in Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Stephan Wackwitz, Thomas Medicus, Dagmar Leupold, and Uwe Timm
- 6 Lost Heimat in Generational Novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, and Angelika Overath
- 7 “A Different Family Story”: German Wartime Suffering in Women's Writing by Wibke Bruhns, Ute Scheub, and Christina von Braun
- 8 The Place of German Wartime Suffering in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Family Texts
- 9 “Why only now?”: The Representation of German Wartime Suffering as a “Memory Taboo” in Günter Grass's Novella
- 10 Rereading Der Vorleser, Remembering the Perpetrator
- 11 Narrating German Suffering in the Shadow of Holocaust Victimology: W. G. Sebald, Contemporary Trauma Theory, and Dieter Forte's Air Raids Epic
- 12 Günter Grass's Account of German Wartime Suffering in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer?
- 13 Jackboots and Jeans: The Private and the Political in Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders
- 14 Memory-Work in Recent German Novels: What (if Any) Limits Remain on Empathy with the “German Experience” of the Second World War?
- 15 “Secondary Suffering” and Victimhood: The “Other” of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink's “Die Beschneidung” and Maxim Biller's “Harlem Holocaust”
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
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
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 W. G. Sebald and German Wartime Suffering
- 2 The Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald, Gert Ledig, and the Allied Bombings
- 3 Expulsion Novels of the 1950s: More than Meets the Eye?
- 4 “In this prison of the guard room”: Heinrich Böll's Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939–1945 in the Context of Contemporary Debates
- 5 Family, Heritage, and German Wartime Suffering in Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Stephan Wackwitz, Thomas Medicus, Dagmar Leupold, and Uwe Timm
- 6 Lost Heimat in Generational Novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, and Angelika Overath
- 7 “A Different Family Story”: German Wartime Suffering in Women's Writing by Wibke Bruhns, Ute Scheub, and Christina von Braun
- 8 The Place of German Wartime Suffering in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Family Texts
- 9 “Why only now?”: The Representation of German Wartime Suffering as a “Memory Taboo” in Günter Grass's Novella
- 10 Rereading Der Vorleser, Remembering the Perpetrator
- 11 Narrating German Suffering in the Shadow of Holocaust Victimology: W. G. Sebald, Contemporary Trauma Theory, and Dieter Forte's Air Raids Epic
- 12 Günter Grass's Account of German Wartime Suffering in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer?
- 13 Jackboots and Jeans: The Private and the Political in Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders
- 14 Memory-Work in Recent German Novels: What (if Any) Limits Remain on Empathy with the “German Experience” of the Second World War?
- 15 “Secondary Suffering” and Victimhood: The “Other” of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink's “Die Beschneidung” and Maxim Biller's “Harlem Holocaust”
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
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).
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- Information
- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009