‘We Shall Be Punished’: Positionality and Postmemory in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow

Abstract

During the Second World War, the German officer Wilm Hosenfeld, on duty in Poland, wrote about the war atrocities committed by his country, ‘We shall be punished for it. And so will our innocent children, for we are colluding when we allow these crimes to be committed.’ Taking this diary entry as its starting point, this essay assesses Rachel Seiffert’s 2001 novel The Dark Room and Uwe Timm’s 2005 autobiographical novella In My Brother’s Shadow in the light of contemporary German victim and collective guilt discourses, transposing Marianne Hirsch’s term ‘postmemory’ on to the children of the perpetrators.