ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to call attention to the affinities between American novelist-psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis and several major themes in modern German history. It depicts a gifted American writer and his lifelong effort to cope with a horrifying past. The chapter offers four widely divergent angles, intensely personal and bookishly academic, deeply serious and bizarrely comic, on post-reunification Germany and its onerous history. It focuses on attention shifts back and forth between the burdens of the Nazi and German Democratic Republic (GDR) pasts, showing their impact on topics ranging from an American's childhood trauma to new interpretations of the Gulag and the Holocaust to a peculiar trade dispute in the European Union. A quick glance through Wheelis's work turns up numerous comments about many of the topics that we addressed in part two of the chapter, Nietzsche, Marxist ideology, the Hitler regime, the Nuremberg Trials, and the importance of a humane pedagogy for children's healthy d.
