ABSTRACT
As early as 1993, the historian James E. Young raised the question, whether “without the wall as a punitive reminder, Germany will become a little more like other nations.” He went so far as to predict that “Germany’s national institutions will recall primarily its own martyrs and triumphs” rather than continue to dwell on the dark side of its history. 1 Young was only partly correct in this assessment, since unified Germany is as much in thrall to the memory of the Nazi period as it was two or three decades ago. But he was right insofar as in the new century Germany has entered into a different “memory regime,” even if the reasons go beyond unification, and the changes occurred with a certain time lag. By now sufficient evidence exists for there to be talk of a “paradigm change,” pithily summarized in the phrase that a “perpetrator people” had mutated into a “victim nation.” 2 The social historian Harald Welzer quotes Günter Grass’ first person narrator in Im Krebsgang (2002, 32) to hint at one reason for this change: “In all the years,” Grass’ narrator Paul Pokriefke muses, “when, as a freelancer I wrote longish articles for Nature journals about biodynamic vegetable gardens and the environmental damage done to German forests, not forgetting confessional tracts about “never again Auschwitz,” I managed to stay mum about the circumstances of my birth,” from which Welzer concludes that Grass is recasting the original trauma of Germany’s post-war society from “doing” (perpetrator) to “being done to” (victim), from “agency” to “suffering,” from “other” to “self,” and thus to “announce a paradigm change in the Federal Republic’s memory culture that hitherto was defined, precisely, by “never again Auschwitz.” 3 Grass’ “circumstances of my birth.” in other words, are Young’s “Germany, recalling its own martyrs.”
