7 - The Future of Väterliteratur: Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser and Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders

Summary

For the inheritors of the Nazi legacy, a moral life seemed to require a condemnation of their parents — an excruciating, an almost impossible, conflict. How do you feel about someone you love whom you have a duty to hate?

— Eva Hoffman, “The Uses of Illiteracy”

I come to speak of these father books because inherent in them is a structural problem that concerns me once again in connection with your, as I have said, far more important text: How can one speak about perpetrators who at the same time were one's own fathers (or brothers)?

— Robert Cohen, “Letter to Uwe Timm about His Book In My Brother's Shadow”

The Future of Väterliteratur

According to most histories of postwar West German literature, Väterliteratur is a phenomenon that erupted onto the literary scene in the late seventies and dominated German literary representation of the Nazi past through the mid-1980s. This conception of the genre certainly aligns with the notion of the Tendenzwende (change in trend), which holds that the very public political activism that marked the art and literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s gave way to a withdrawal into the private sphere, which in turn manifested itself as a concentration, often in autobiographical form, on the subjective individual experience of social structures and on the ways in which power is enacted and negotiated in personal relationships. This introspective turn toward the self and questions of identity, termed by literary critics variously as Neue Subjektivität (New Subjectivity), Neue Sensibilität (New Sensibility), and Neue Innerlichkeit (New Inwardness), thus transformed the literary agenda of the second generation.