The Appeal of Life Writing
THIS VOLUME OF ESSAYS examines life writing after major turning points in Germany's history in the twentieth century: the First World War, the Nazi era and beyond, the collapse of the GDR, and German unification. German life writing in the twentieth century in the form of autobiography has often attracted considerable public attention, perhaps because a personal account captures the mood or a mood of the time. Erich Maria Remarque's semi-autobiographical account of a soldier's experiences in the First World War, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929), sold 1.2 million copies by 1933. Autobiography may also gain a large audience because of the prominence of the author. Some nine million copies of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a mixture of autobiography and political treatise, published in two parts in 1925 and 1926, were sold or distributed by 1940. Its significance today tends to be located in its contribution to the debate about what Germans could have known about the long-term intentions of the Nazis, even if there is reason to suppose that many people who owned a copy of Mein Kampf had not actually read it.
A prominent author making dramatic personal disclosures will also capture the public's attention: Günter Grass's 2006 autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), created a sensation with its revelation that he was a member of the Waffen-SS towards the end of the Second World War.
Life writing has received much attention from academic researchers. Dagmar Günther registers historians’ growing interest in autobiographies as source material, and academics themselves have contributed to the production of life writing. The West German historian Lutz Niethammer and a team of researchers worked with some 150 East Germans shortly before the collapse of the GDR to produce “lebensgeschichtliche Interviews” (life history interviews). “Opa war kein Nazi” (Grandpa Was No Nazi, 2002) is based on a series of forty family discussions and 142 interviews with individuals from three generations, conducted in the late 1990s and designed to elicit what “normal Germans” remembered of the Nazi period. The study contrasts historical knowledge with collective family memories and feelings about the past, created from the accounts handed down by family members who experienced National Socialism directly.