5 - Confronting the Nazi Past II: German Perpetrators or German Victims?

Summary

Das hört nie auf. Nie hört das auf.

— Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang

IN ULLA HAHN'S UNSCHARFE BILDER (2003), Hans Musbach tells his daughter of a meal at which he was present in the early 1970s during which a colleague's son publicly attacked his father for his wartime service in North Africa. Provoked by the young man's scornful self-righteousness, another colleague then proceeded to act out the final agonies endured in the Balkans by a dying German soldier whose testicles had been cut off by partisans. “‘Ich dachte, Sie wollten wissen, wie es war,’” concluded the older man with evident bitterness at the end of this description of a traumatic episode that had been by no means out of the ordinary, but over which a veil of silence appeared to have been drawn.

Hahn's novel recapitulates, on occasion perhaps rather too obviously, many of the issues central to the sudden “rediscovery” of German wartime suffering towards the end of the 1990s. Had the “68ers” been too harsh in their judgment of their fathers' generation? Did the moral fervor of their condemnation conceal, perhaps, a desire to rearticulate “die eigene Unschuld” or to style themselves “als Opfer der Täter-Väter”? Had there been a lamentable unwillingness to even attempt empathy with the actions of those caught up in the Nazi period? “Hatten sie jemals Nachsicht und Mitgefühl empfunden, zu verstehen versucht?” Finally, does the need to tell of German suffering necessarily relativize the history of German crimes?