THE RENEWED PROMINENCE that has been given in recent German family novels to the suffering of Germans who fought in the Second World War, who were caught up as civilians in the bombing of German cities or in the expulsion of ethnic Germans from parts of Eastern and Central Europe, has, as Helmut Schmitz points out, often been linked to a sense of dissatisfaction with the political legacy of the so-called generation of 1968. The work of Hans-Ulrich Treichel has also been understood in this context as a “contribution to the inner history of the post-war generations.” In a number of academic commentaries, Treichel's Der Verlorene (Lost, 1998) is read alongside Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), a text that explicitly highlights the alleged failure of both Grass's generation and that of 1968 to properly address the question of German wartime suffering. Stuart Taberner's detailed analysis operates within this framework and suggests, for instance, that Treichel's novel demonstrates the failure of the '68 generation to empathize with the suffering of the parental generation as normal adolescent rebellion becomes “channelled into the issue that seems most to separate the generations, that is, the Nazi past.” However, placed in the context of Treichel's more extensive writing based on his family's experiences at the end of the war, it is possible to observe in this author's work an examination of the failed development of personal identity.