‘Secondary suffering’ and victimhood – the construction of a burdened German identity and its other in Bernhard Schlink's Die Beschneidung and Maxim Biller's Harlem Holocaust

Abstract

It has often been claimed that until the 1990s there had existed a taboo, or at least strict discursive rules in German public discourse, regarding depictions of “Germans as victims,” which made it difficult for Germans to remember and mourn their own wartime suffering. According to this interpretation of the history of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), the taboo was finally lifted in the years following German unification, allowing for the slow emergence of a long-neglected, more differentiated account of the experiences of “normal” Germans during the Nazi period, which is still in need of elaboration today. In this chapter, I examine this version of the history of German public memory as a construct that is closely linked to contemporary discourses of German identity but which also relies on complementary constructions of its “Other.” The obvious counterpart to the apparent new openness of the memory of National Socialism are other forms of public memory, especially the seemingly simplistic and moralistic memory of the Holocaust associated with the generation of ’68. Yet I argue that the complementary Other created in recent debates about the need for greater differentiation in German memory discourse is often a particular construction of Jewish identity. To explore the connection between German “secondary suffering” — that is, the notion of a struggle with the memory of German guilt, and calls for a more complex approach to remembering National Socialism and a problematic view of Jewish identity, I examine two very different short stories: Bernhard Schlink’s “Die Beschneidung” (The Circumcision, 2000) and Maxim Biller’s “Harlem Holocaust” (1990).