The Meaning of The Nazi Past in The Post-Postwar: Recent Fiction by Günter Grass, Christa Wolf and Martin Walser

Abstract

Today, Germany may finally be emerging into its “post–post-war,” some twenty-plus years after the term was first coined in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War (see Kirchner and Sperling). First, a period of nearly seventy years has passed since the end of the Second World War. The last wartime generation is dying out, and soon there will be no living witnesses to the twelve years of National Socialism that so definitively shaped the politics and culture of the two post-war Germanies, and of the socalled Berlin Republic that emerged post-unification. All future understanding of that period will be historically mediated, a product of what Jan Assmann has called a society’s “cultural memory.” Moreover, that generation – born from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, described by Dirk Moses as the 45ers and by Jens Hacke as the “long generation” (30) – will, self-evidently, no longer dominate German culture, politics, and society as it has for so many decades. Second, the profound changes set in motion by unification, and some changes that were already under way before 1990, are now finally coming to be fully realized, in both senses of the word. In the late 1990s, Normalitat was still a contested term, wrestled by Gerhard Schroder, newly minted as chancellor in 1998 after sixteen years of conservative dominance under Helmut Kohl (see Taberner and Cooke), from its previous almost exclusive association with rightwing, New Right, or even far-right nationalism (see Berger). In 2013, in contrast, the term scarcely raises an eyebrow, and most commentators would probably agree that the Federal Republic is now at last more or less “normal.” By this they generally mean sovereign, democratic, relatively self-confident, and, above all, Western. It may be a “muted normality,” as The Economist put it in March 2010 (“A Muted Normality”), continuing the Bonn republic’s internalization of selfrestraint (see Baumann and Hellmann) and preference for multilateralism – action taken in concert with other nations or institutions – but we should not underestimate how far Germany has come over the last two decades. Germany is still instinctively a civilian power (see Schweers). But “active” interventions from Kosovo to Afghanistan, including, from late 2012, the Bundestag’s decision to