As Time Passes and the temporal distance between ourselves and the traumatic events of the Second World War grows, the quality of embodied memory that we associate with the status of the witness and with the genre of testimony is giving way to encoded representations of the past. Our image of the past is less and less influenced by contact with survivors and members of the war generation and more and more by mediations and remediations of past events. This new media milieu of representations that has been formed over the last two decades has had a profound effect on the way we imagine the past. We are surrounded by rapidly growing prosthetic memory consisting of a mass of archival information and a number of iconic images that form a common repertoire of symbolic references in cultural memory and public communication. At this point, literary reimaginings of recent German history not only interact with this extended historical archive of texts and images but also intervene in the public imaginary and engage with the patterns and stereotypes that have become fixed references in the collective memory of postwar generations.

With the increasing distance from the historic events of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the role of the witness in literary texts has also changed. Marcel Beyer’s novel Kaltenburg (2008) is a case in point. Beyer’s protagonist, a seventy-one-year-old man whose life spans two German dictatorships, is a susceptive yet passive mediator figure who refracts the different historical environments of the Nazi period, the war, the GDR and post-unification Germany without much reflection or critical engagement. He does not form his own projects. Instead he becomes the product of an overpowering mentor whose scientific life project he shares. In order to write about the sixty-five year period when German history underwent the most dramatic changes in its history, Beyer chooses a traumatized child witness who also becomes a secondary witness through his close affiliation with his mentor and father-figure, Kaltenburg. Through his protagonists he creates a rather subdued and indirect perspective on the transformations of German history, one that reshuffles established hierarchies in the collective memory and challenges the received categories of victim and perpetrator without leveling them.