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[pynchonoid]

[...] But the dead return; unacknowledged suffering
claims its due. That seems to be the lesson of the
German war memories that have washed over the new
Berlin Republic in the past few years. Diaries,
memoirs, historical novels, academic studies,
documentaries and even feature-length films have piled
up at a formidable clip, testifying to a long pent-up
need for expression. Interestingly, most of these
reflections do not come from conservatives or
spokesmen of the far right but from former New
Leftists who reshaped the politics of German memory in
the late 1960s and early '70s and adamantly opposed
the attempts of Ernst Nolte and other historians in
the mid-'80s to compare Hitler's crimes to Stalin's
purges and other instances of mass slaughter. The same
people who insisted on the "singularity" of Nazi
atrocities and rejected the very notion of historical
comparison (for fear of relativizing the Holocaust and
diminishing German responsibility) now speak of the
"unparalleled" destruction of German cities and openly
question the morality of the Anglo-American Bomber
Command.

This reversal in the politics of German memory has
alarmed many observers, who worry that Germany's
current fascination with its own victimhood signals a
desire to let the specificity of Nazi crimes fade into
a historical continuum of other war crimes. In fact,
the recent interest in German suffering represents an
extension of Holocaust memory, not its demise. What
has changed is the willingness of the '68 generation
to consider the full scope of wartime suffering--even
that of their own parents and older relatives.
Precisely because German recognition of the Holocaust
is no longer in doubt, a new generation of Germans has
come to understand the war in less ideological, less
Manichean terms. Individual suffering, not a simple
tallying of perpetrators and victims, is beginning to
emerge in striking historical detail and complexity.
[...]

... read it all:  "Review of Books About Germany and
WW II" by Mark Anderson

"Mr. Anderson is a professor of German at Columbia
University."

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/17269.html

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