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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2023
DETECTIVE FICTION IS ONE OF the most popular genres of fiction today in the German-speaking world, and it has a long history of popularity there. In fact, German was one of the very first languages in which the genre appeared. And yet the genre of detective fiction in German today is faced with unique challenges and issues. Simply put, there is a specter haunting German detective fiction: the specter of the Nazi past. The weight of this past is so strong that it turns Germanlanguage detective fiction into a “site of memory” (Erinnerungsort, lieu de mémoire). Of course, there is hardly an aspect of German culture since 1945 that is not “haunted” in this way, but detective fiction has particularities that set it apart and make the weight of the past particularly heavy. To understand this, we need to look first at the genre’s “rules of the game.”
Detective fiction starts with a crime, usually murder. It then asks a reader to identify with a detective as she or he brings about some form of resolution and justice by tracking down the criminal using a process of logical deduction. Yet here comes the problem: for the last 50 years it has been nearly impossible for a German-speaking audience to easily identify with a German detective or accept one as the hero of a novel, because of the sure knowledge that a real German (or Austrian) detective might well have been a perpetrator of Nazi crimes. Though, as we will see below, setting a novel in a time and place far from the Nazi era can attenuate this, it is a problem of memory and not of chronology. Any German-speaking detective automatically raises the memory of the past. Since detective fiction is always about a quest for justice, or at least a search for knowledge about a (past) crime, in the Germanspeaking world the genre inevitably becomes a “site of memory,” which forces anyone engaged with it (as reader, as writer) to remember the Nazi past and take a position on it. Thus detective fiction in German bears a special responsibility for dealing with the past and commenting on the present.
Memory and the History of Detective Fiction in Germany
A “site of memory,” in the sense of Pierre Nora, is an object, place, or even idea that is heavily inscribed with collective memory.
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