Helmut Schmitz, On their own terms: German literature and the legacy of National Socialism after unification (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2004)
In the decade since German Unification in 1990, literary and public discourse on the legacy of National Socialism has continuously shifted. One of the emerging issues is the question of how the Œperpetrator collective¹ remembers and represents its past, both with view to victim experience as well as in relation to its own experience. On Their Own Terms is a study of how post-1990 German literature reconfigures the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. In five sections Historisation, Perpetrators, Hitler-Youth Memories, War Memories and Victim Perspective a number of key literary works such as Bernhard Schlink¹s Der Vorleser, Martin Walser¹s Ein springender Brunnen, Günter Grass¹s Im Krebsgang and W.G.Sebald¹s Austerlitz are analysed. The literary texts are situated within the wider context of contemporary German debates on the issue, from the exhibition ŒCrimes of the German Wehrmacht 1941-1945¹, to the Walser-Bubis-affair and the ensuing debate about representations of German suffering. One of the central concerns of this book is the literary configuration of German experience and the narrative strategies employed by the writers to validate it against or set it in context with a perspective of victim experience.
Helmut Schmitz is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of a monograph on Hanns-Josef Ortheil (1997) and has edited the collection German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past (2001).
Copies of the book can be obtained from Central Books www.centralbooks.com
|