War and Remembrance

In a provocative book published recently in Germany, a Hamburg scholar named Klaus Briegleb appeared to take on the entire national literary establishment for indulging in self-censorship of the most dangerous kind. Titled Neglect and Taboo: How Anti-Semitic Was the Group 47?, the book puts forth a kind of conspiracy theory about the writers who laid the intellectual foundations of West Germany after the war. By setting the ground rules for the new literature, Briegleb argues, these members of the so-called Group '47--among them Hans Werner Richter, Alfred Andersch, Heinrich Böll and a younger generation including Günter Grass and Martin Walser--banished the Nazi past to silence, even as they purposefully nurtured its democratic opposite.

For a group often associated with the anti-Fascist left, the notion seems farfetched. Grass, for one, has for decades invoked Auschwitz as an ever-present reality in German life. But Briegleb's polemic nonetheless stirred up considerable interest as a counterpoint to a far larger debate about the role of taboos in literature--one that is traceable to W.G. Sebald, most known in the United States for his novels Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. In 1997, Sebald gave a series of lectures on "Air War and Literature" in which he contested that, indeed, German writers had remained virtually mum about certain aspects of the Nazi years. His primary concern, however, was not German guilt but German suffering--namely the deaths of some 600,000 civilians during the Allied bombardment, which he argued had never been adequately rendered in prose:

There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.

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