14 - Memory-Work in Recent German Novels: What (if Any) Limits Remain on Empathy with the “German Experience” of the Second World War?

Summary

IN HIS EXCELLENT DISCUSSION OF “historicism, sentimentality and the problem of empathy,” Helmut Schmitz argues that “an uncritical representation of Germans as victims is […] frequently in danger of reproducing collective notions of identity based on ethnically dubious concepts.” In a second piece, Schmitz argues more forcefully that the ultimate aim of “discursive attempts to ‘contain’ the Holocaust within a nationalised memory discourse” — the attempt to refocus contemporary perspectives onto “Germans as victims” — is to “relegitimise a German perspective on National Socialism from the vantage point of empathy.”2 Empathy, in Schmitz's view, may be all too easily misappropriated for the purpose of rebuilding a German national consciousness and excluding the primary victims of Nazism — Jews, Sinti, and Roma, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, slave laborers, and dissidents persecuted by the regime and the millions who sustained it.

Yet it may be that all attempts in contemporary German writing to depict the life stories of so-called ordinary Germans empathetically, and not just those that offer an uncritical representation of German suffering, reproduce collective notions of identity and “relegitimise a German perspective on National Socialism,” to use Schmitz's formulation. They do this almost by definition insofar as the attempt to create empathy, of whatever kind, already presumes a collective. At the most general level, this may be “humankind.” Within the context of German authors writing on “German” themes for German readers, however, it quickly comes to imply a “German” collective — the degree of exclusivity will vary, of course, and this is certainly worth examining.