ABSTRACT
The Mitscherlichs' Inability to Mourn was first published in 1967 at a time in West Germany when official narratives of Germany's wartime experience began to unravel. For critics such as Walter Dirks and the Mitscherlichs, West Germany's formal commitment to western democracy sustained by anti-Communism, economic reconstruction, and narratives of wartime suffering actually thwarted the cultivation of a substantial concept of democratic culture. Historical consciousness of German perpetration became codified in official cultural memory as the cornerstone of domestic and international sovereignty. Cultural memory has focused on mourning the suffering of a group who appear to challenge cosmopolitan perpetrator memory: German victims of the Second World War. The popular resonance of the personalized, emotive retelling of the air war and German expulsions has been interpreted as evidence of the "clear gap" that separates official memory culture and the communicative memories which structure family narratives of the past.
