ABSTRACT
In the final part of W. G. Sebald’s 1992 collection of ‘Vier lange Erzählungen’ Die Ausgewanderten, the first-person narrator, during a research visit to Bad Kissingen, where he is seeking traces of the former Jewish community, expresses his frustration at ‘die rings mich umgebende Geistesverarmung und Erinnerungslosigkeit der Deutschen, das Geschick, mit dem man alles bereinigt hatte’. German unity in 1990 put an end to the public display of this particular ideological view of German history at any official level. At the same time, it accelerated the process that began with the Historikerstreit: the reassessment of this history in the light of the changed contemporary political situation. When the focus of the novel switches to Claus Haresch, he too encounters events and people that are presented in such a negative light that one is almost in the world of caricature. Germany, it seems, continues to be populated by prejudiced Kleinbürger that damn all that it is new and different.
