FROM AROUND THE MID-1990s, there has been a veritable renaissance of the family novel in German-language literature. A strikingly large number of texts address issues of German twentieth-century history through the medium of family stories by way of fictional, biographical, and autobiographical narratives. In contrast to the condemnatory tone of a first wave of family narratives in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with their often explicit dissociation from family and tradition, recent family novels investigate continuities of tradition and legacy between wartime and postwar generations.

According to Sigrid Weigel, these intergenerational texts substitute the previously dominant model of generation as experiential community, as developed by Karl Mannheim, for a genealogical model. Weigel argues that Mannheim's model with its concept of synchronicity of experience and implicit forgetting of genealogy implies the “rejection or denial of one's own parentage,” a model that after the Second World War animates the “Gruppe 47” (Group 47, the loose collection of oppositional West German writers in the postwar period), with their idea of a guilt-free, new generation, and the notion of a zero hour. This fantasy of a virgin birth is repeated by the student movement in 1968 in their rejection of the “perpetrator-fathers.” It is only the reawakened interest in the family history in recent years, Weigel argues, that has overcome this model that animated the so-called father-novels of the 1970s and 1980s, which, with their focus on the perpetrator-fathers, obscured the issue of a transgenerational transfer of trauma.