Literary Texts In Which A Child, usually a son, confronts the relevant representative of the previous generation, though not restricted to German literature, do constitute a particularly strong tradition within it. Even a cursory glance reveals that there have been several waves of this kind of literature over the last hundred years or so; Kafka’s Brief an den Vater (1919) and the notorious parricide texts of Expressionism spring instantly to mind, as does the phenomenon of the so-called “Väterliteratur” that appeared on both sides of the German-German border in the 1970s and 1980s. This “literature about fathers” was mainly written by sons of the generation of 1968 attempting to come to terms, both individually and historically, with their fathers’ carefully concealed complicity in the crimes of the Nazi era. Representative examples might be Klaus Schlesinger’s Michael (1971), Peter Härtling’s Nachgetragene Liebe (1980), and Peter Schneider’s Vati (1987).

Parallel to this wave, though, albeit slightly later to emerge, there appeared another set of books in which a different, even counter-group of fathers came into the spotlight: communist party functionaries. Sometimes subject to arrest and persecution under the Nazis, these individuals later joined the class of party functionaries in the GDR, held positions of responsibility there, and over the years were either afflicted with a kind of dogmatic sclerosis, worn down by an accumulation of repressed conflicts, or relegated to the margins of society. There was a trickle of books about their lives before the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, but afterwards, and in conjunction with the mass of archive material that then became available, this turned into a flood.

The phenomenon doesn’t end there, however. Over the last ten to fifteen years further trends can be observed, such as the confrontation between the children of the 60s (long since turned parents themselves), and between left-wing Western intellectuals generally and their own children — I am thinking here, inter alia, of Tilman Jens’s Demenz (2009); the increased attention paid to mothers, for example in Christoph Meckel’s Suchbild: Meine Mutter (2002) and Barbara Honigmann’s Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004); and the phenomenon dubbed “Großmütterliteratur,” accounts of grandmothers by authors such as Jenny Erpenbeck. A further trend, already observable in the examples cited here, is the increasing tendency of women authors to engage in these debates.