‘Gegen den Strich’: The Early Representation of German Wartime Suffering in Walter Kempowski's Mark Und Bein (1991)

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines Walter Kempowski's Mark und Bein. Eine Episode (1991), a text that commemorates and represents the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans from the eastern territories at the end of the Second World War. Published almost a decade before the recent preoccupation with ‘German wartime suffering’ began, the book was largely ignored by critics, scholars and the public at the time of its publication. I argue that Mark und Bein anticipates some of the major themes in Germany's ongoing ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ and should be reconsidered in the context of the current wave of literary representations of German victimhood. Reflecting on the various ‘memory contests’ surrounding the Nazi past, the text aims to represent German victimhood in a way that shuns both ‘political correctness’ and apologism, and attempts a more inclusive portrayal where German suffering and German perpetration stand alongside each other. This article contends that Mark und Bein largely succeeds in achieving historical balance, despite occasional dehistoricising or relativising elements in the narrative, and is thus an early and valuable example of post‐unification German fiction attempting adequately to represent Germany's past.