The German Genius

would have collapsed much earlier if so many writers had not constantly legitimized it, and Peter Schneider agreed. After 1989, incredible as it may seem now, more than one East German writer went on record as regretting the demise of “a utopian alternative” to the federal/capitalist state. No less telling was Christa Wolf’s argument, in an interview she gave in 1990, that “the great ideologies had not only become more and more dubious, but also less important, no longer offering a guide as to moral values or behaviour.” 23 Such views were mocked mercilessly by Enzensberger for their anguish over lost “fundamental experiences” and “slow-moving Sundays.” 24
    T HE D IMENSIONS OF G ERMAN S UFFERING
     
    Once again we should remind ourselves not to shoehorn postwar German writing into one or two simple patterns (“We didn’t just have autumn and winter,” said the East German actress Corinna Harfouch, “we had spring and summer too”). 25 Here we must mention a breed of angry writers, people such as the Austrians Thomas Bernhard, Felix Mitterer, and Gerhard Roth, and the Swiss Peter Bichsel. Bernhard died in 1989, just as unification occurred, but not before he (and others like him) had published a raft of books denouncing his country as “a vile place,” a cold and isolated “sump of immorality” that had never addressed its past. His titles reflect his verdict— Der Keller: eine Entziehung ( The Cellar: A Withdrawal ; 1979); Die Kälte: eine Isolation ( The Coldness: An Isolation ; 1981); and Auslöschung: ein Zerfall ( Extinction: A Degeneration ; 1986). 26
    Toward the end of the century, three authors emerged who paralleled Böll, Grass, and Walser. Bernhard Schlink’s best-known book is Der Vorleser ( The Reader ; 1995), set in the 1950s and telling the story of a young teenager, later a law student, who has an affair with Hanna, an older woman who is an uneducated tram conductor. Only after we are well into the book do we discover that Hanna has a secret past as a guard in a concentration camp. By the time of the revelation, we have responded to her as a sympathetic character, but Schlink’s underlying point is that Hanna admits her guilt and that in Germany, in the immediate postwar years, it was easier for those guilty of lesser crimes to concede their culpability than it was for those responsible for much greater wrongdoing. For Schlink, distinguishing between the greater and lesser evils is an important element in overcoming the past. In its way, this brings the Mitscherlich argument full circle, that the greater the crimes a war criminal has committed, the more likely he or she is to be mired in psychic immobilism. The character of Hanna, based in part on a real woman, was deconstructed by Tom Bower in the London Sunday Times , showing how such a figure—unable to read and write—could not have existed in the Third Reich. 27
    W. G. Sebald, in Austerlitz (2001), his last and best-known book, tells the story of a child evacuated from Prague to Wales in 1939 who goes in search of his past. This journey, which at one stage includes a single sentence ten pages long, describing a visit to the concentration camps, what is left of them, brings him face to face, in a calm tongue reminiscent of Goethe, with German suffering, a theme Sebold returned to in Luftkrieg und Literatur (translated as On the Natural History of Destruction ; 1999), where he gives a vivid description of the firestorm unleashed by the Allies over Hamburg in 1943. This theme was explored even more starkly in Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand ( The Fire ; 2002), six hundred pages about the imbalance in the number of dead in the bombing raids. In particular, 80,000 died in two night raids on Hamburg and Dresden, more deaths from bombing than in the entire United Kingdom during the whole war. Overall, 600,000 Germans died from the bombing, more than ten times the British deaths. Friedrich was not trying to excuse the Nazis, nor being “dangerously soft”—he had, in 1984, in Die kalte Amnestie ( Cold Amnesty ), cataloged how the West German establishment “remained infected” by Nazism in the years after the war. But he did draw attention to the fact that the Allied mass killing brought no military gain. 28
    In the same year, Günter Grass published Im Krebsgang ( Crabwalk ). This again dealt with memory and the question of German suffering through the sinking of the passenger liner Wilhelm Gustloff , torpedoed by a