Unencumbered by History: Identity, Modernity, and the Holocaust in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster

Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster present, comparatively, in relation to their specific authors and societies, fictive counterparts to cultural perspectives on the National Socialist period of German history that have also been developed in the disciplines of history, sociology, and related fields. The explicative methodology is freely adapted from ideas by Edward Said into an analytic modality based on the comparison of multiple critical perspectives. The sense of the works emerges from cultural discourses and narratives of memory involving the relationship between personal subjectivity and German cultural identity. Evaluating claims of history as narrative, also interrogates the roles of individual and collective memory in the construction of those discourses and narratives, as well as analyzing the "legitimizing" narratives of nation states. As such, the relation of these to concepts of modernity is an issue for discussion. That these concepts were viewed differently in the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic has important consequences for literature produced in those societies, including Grass’s and Wolf's works, in terms of narrative viewpoint and overall communicative strategies. Current narratives relating to the unification of the German state reveal a desire to become, in the name of 'normalization', finally unencumbered by a past often considered to be one of unique criminality and inhumanity embodied in the Holocaust. I argue that Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster have continuing relevance to contemporary narratives of these problems and to disputes over the continued importance of the Holocaust to historical memory within German culture