ABSTRACT
The first attempt at a comprehensive survey of (West) German literary approaches to the Holocaust, Ernestine Schlant’s The Language of Silence was published ten years after the fall of the wall in 1999. Significantly, Schlant notices that after 1990 the discourse of addressing the past has moved from literature to public representation, to museums and memorials, particularly Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish museum and the planned Holocaust memorial in Berlin, suggesting an institutionalization of the Holocaust. Schlant sees the shift from literary to representational forms of discourse as indicative of a growing integration of National Socialism into contemporary Germany’s self-image. The decision to build a Holocaust memorial in Berlin and the recent agreement between German companies and victims of forced Nazi labour over compensation point towards a growing integration of the NS complex and to the acceptance of National Socialism as prehistory of a unified German state.
