4: “In this prison of the guard room”: Heinrich Böll’s Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939–1945 in the Context of Contemporary Debates

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgments vii
4. Introduction 1
5. 1: W. G. Sebald and German Wartime Suffering 15
6. 2: The Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald, Gert Ledig, and the Allied Bombings 29
7. 3: Expulsion Novels of the 1950s: More than Meets the Eye? 42
8. 4: “In this prison of the guard room”: Heinrich Böll’s Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939–1945 in the Context of Contemporary Debates 56
9. 5: Family, Heritage, and German Wartime Suffering in Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Stephan Wackwitz, Thomas Medicus, Dagmar Leupold, and Uwe Timm 70
10. 6: Lost Heimat in Generational Novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, and Angelika Overath 86
11. 7: “A Different Family Story”: German Wartime Suffering in Women’s Writing by Wibke Bruhns, Ute Scheub, and Christina von Braun 102
12. 8: The Place of German Wartime Suffering in Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Family Texts 118
13. 9: “Why only now?”: The Representation of German Wartime Suffering as a “Memory Taboo” in Günter Grass’s Novella Im Krebsgang 133
14. 10: Rereading Der Vorleser, Remembering the Perpetrator 147
15. 11: Narrating German Suffering in the Shadow of Holocaust Victimology: W. G. Sebald, Contemporary Trauma Theory, and Dieter Forte’s Air Raids Epic 162
16. 12: Günter Grass’s Account of German Wartime Suffering in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer? 177
17. 13: Jackboots and Jeans: The Private and the Political in Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders 191
18. 14: Memory-Work in Recent German Novels: What (if Any) Limits Remain on Empathy with the “German Experience” of the Second World War? 205
19. 15: “Secondary Suffering” and Victimhood: The “Other” of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink’s “Die Beschneidung” and Maxim Biller’s “Harlem Holocaust” 219
20. Works Cited 233
21. Contributors 251
22. Index 255