IN A UNIFIED GERMANY, defining a German nation and what it means to be German have once again become key issues within culture and society. The wish for a national communal identity that accommodates both the new situation in Germany and the larger European context goes hand in hand with a current shift in self-view: Germans today often characterize themselves within their society by what connects them with others, what they have communally lived and suffered through, rather than by what distinguishes them from each other. Revisiting the Nazi past and the Second World War in both the former East and West Germany has become an important basis for finding and defining a new national identity, which many Germans of all ages yearn for, as well as for establishing a personal identity. Not all Germans agree on the same interpretation of the Nazi past. Yet the majority see it as the most fundamental formative event of their country's current state, and the commemoration of this past has taken on an important cultural role. Germans of all generations emphasize that the Nazi era is inseparable both from their family histories and from German society as a whole, but, more than that, that it also changed and impacted severely the rest of Europe and indeed the world. Consequently Germans need to consider this period in history when trying to find a common basis for what it means to be German. This remembrance is particularly important in a country that has not only achieved reunification within but is also united with its fellow European states. Literature and film have taken on a key role in this discourse of memory. Indeed, more than sixty years after the end of the Second World War, not only have Nazi Germany and the events of the war not lost their thematic presence, but their popularity has increased dramatically.

The literature that arises from this background has thus become an integral part of German cultural production since unification. It is a “literature of remembrance” that is multi-generational; on the one hand several generations of writers are involved in its creation, and on the other the texts are most often family novels, with plots that span two, three, or even more generations and depict German history through the lens of one family's microcosm and the changes that occur within it.