Fred Bauder wrote:
Here's a link (good for a few days) on the theme Helga was harping on:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/arts/18SCHN.html?todaysheadlines
F
Only in the past three years or so have German writers and historians begun to tackle a topic previously taboo: the sufferings of the German civilian population in the last years of World War II. (The Sebald essay, which was excerpted in The New Yorker in November, is being published by Random House in the United States next month under the title "On the Natural History of Destruction.")
At least one reason for the almost complete avoidance of this topic would appear to be self-evident: the critical authors of postwar Germany considered it a moral and aesthetic impossibility to describe the Germans, the nation responsible for the world war, as being among the victims of that war.
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Hmm. similar to the way *no-one* in France talks about collaboration with the occupiers. Some 3 years ago a French historian published a book about it, and was immediately shunned in academic circles & criticized in the press, I heard.
there must be a special term for it ... post-traumatic shame or something.