ABSTRACT
After the Holocaust, is it really possible to talk about “German suffering?” The controversial discourse of German wartime suffering raises important questions about remembering and responsibility. When Germans focus on their own traumas, how do they account for the unimaginable suffering their nation caused others? When does talk of suffering become a way of avoiding guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust? The questions posed in this chapter illustrate German struggles with memory. Using the author’s own inherited memories as a third generation German, whose parents were children during the war and whose grandparents were active in the war, Frie suggests that German wartime experience tends to be remembered in isolation from its historical circumstances. As a result, intergenerational memory in German families easily gives way to talk of victimization. The kind of moral slippage the author describes creates narratives in which the Nazi past and the role of family members as perpetrators and bystanders are kept at bay. This chapter addresses the moral contexts of trauma using the author's inherited memories as a starting point for reflection and exploration. The author juxtaposes his family’s experience of the Allied bombings of Hanover with the simultaneous annihilation of Hanover’s German-Jewish community, and the experience of a single German-Jewish family. The observations he makes can be applied to other historical traumas in which contexts of perpetration and moral responsibility are neglected, particularly among past perpetrator groups. An illustration of this process concerning slavery in the American south is examined.
