On the (In)Compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory

This article analyses the current shift in German memory concerning the issue of German suffering at the end of the Second World War. Contrary to widely held belief, these themes are not novel: German suffering was a topic of discourse immediately after the war in the private and political sphere. What is new in the current context, however, is the intensity of the unexpected return of these issues and their wide social resonance among different classes and generations. With this shift in focus, new memory contests arise. One paradigmatic case is the polarity created between a memory of German guilt and a memory of German suffering as represented by the two popular historians Hannes Heer and Jorg Friedrich; another concerns the (still ongoing) debate around a new centre for flight and expulsion. It is argued that the impasse of recent cultural memory debate typified by Heer and Friedrich can be surpassed by a more complex understanding of the structure of memory. According to this view, various levels of heterogeneous memory can exist side by side if they are contained within a normative frame of generally accepted validity.