Suffering from the Past – The Reprossesing of National Socialism in W. G. Sebald’s Novel Austerlitz

Abstract

Among the many radical changes that the German unification in 1989/90 brought about for the Germans in East and West, one of particular importance is the processing of the Nazi past and its precipitation in fictional literature in the context of identity redefinition. Here it can be observed that the ideas, according to which the debate about National Socialism and its consequences takes place, are increasingly shifting from a perpetrator’s perspective of the 1950s and ‘60s to a victim perspective, which increasingly focuses on German suffering during the Nazi period and World War II. The fact that this is not just a question of breaking the silence about the decades of frowned upon wretched experiences undergone by the German population, but it seems to be a general tendency of the narrative perspective to get gradually detached from the question of guilt of the National Socialism in order to focus on the literary investigation of suffering as shall be presented with the example of the novel Austerlitz by WG Sebald.