Introduction

IT HIT ME WHILE I WAS listening to the political debates prior to Germany's last federal election. Peer Steinbrück—who has the manner and even some of the looks of Dick Cheney, though not of course his right-wing politics—was at the microphone. Never one to mince words, Steinbrück dismissed the interviewer's query regarding a past disagreement with the CDU with the assertion, “Aber das ist alles Vergangenheitsbewältigung.” He was not, of course, referring to the Holocaust, or to anything associated with Germany's “unmasterable” or “uncompleted past”—to reference just two classic studies. The interviewer did not bat an eye, and it did not cause a stir in the press.

But when did “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” take on the meaning of “water under the bridge,” or, to stick with the German, “der Schnee von gestern” (yesterday's snow)? When did it become a moniker for things that are no longer worth bickering about, perhaps no longer even relevant? While Steinbrück's remark is surely a symptom rather than a cause— I don't mean to suggest that he is actually denigrating the serious work of “mastering the past”—it nevertheless handily symbolizes what I take to be a shift in public discourse about the Holocaust that is echoed in our discipline. We have, in short, experienced a “Holocaust Bubble” in German studies. It grew to large proportions in the 1990s, inflated further in the decade thereafter, and then in the ensuing years began to spring a leak. If it did not burst at any particular, easily identifiable point in time, it certainly has deflated significantly. In the following, I want to examine this claim first with reference principally to German studies in the United States; second, with reference to the broader German public sphere; and third, with a sidelong glance at some trends in the presentation of the Holocaust in contemporary German literature. There I will be referring not to bubbles and attention-grabbing expansion, but to embeddedness, enclosure, internment, and marginalization. While at first glance incommensurate with the first two sections, this third part briefly explores the way in which contemporary German literature navigates this new “postbubble” landscape.