Abstract:

Abstract The article offers first an interpretative overview about the essential phases of German historical reappraisal of the Third Reich up to that memory boom in literature and film, which started in the end of the nineties. This boom is marked, on the one hand, by an extreme commercialisation of the past, on the other hand, however, also by critical reviews on former phases of historical memory, in which is disclosed a misuse for other purposes of the reproach of being guilty, made by parts of the post-war-born against their parental generation. The epistemic interest and motivation of post-war-generations partially dealt, according to the critical reviews, more with own moral and political projections than with the past and its actors itself. This suggests the hypothesis that, with an increasing temporal distance to the Second World War, the literary search for truth and justice lost credibility. An argument for this would be, and this puts out the second part of the article, that many literary and philosophical attempts of understanding the horror, written during and/or published immediately after the end of the war, uncovered in a much more differentiated way the various degrees of the entanglement into the Evil. They knew a great variety of becoming guilty and presented even situations, in which it is impossible not to become guilty. These insights of the moral dilemma of human condition, according to the thesis of the article, got lost to a large extend in the following decades.

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