The Child’s View of the Third Reich in German Literature

Cradle and Crucible of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’: Representations of the War Child in the Occupation Period (1945–9). An Introduction1

“…Paradoxically, this is even the case when the child narrator or focaliser has been so completely indoctrinated by the Third Reich as to use its language and rehearse its value system quite unselfconsciously, for the perverted conception of normality this reveals activates the reader, encouraging them to substitute their own values for those presented in the text 28. Literary authors from Günter Grass onwards make use of the myth of childhood innocence in the context of the Third Reich in a self-conscious, indeed in Grass's case, savagely playful manner, in order to provoke fresh engagement with a regime that was already being allowed to fade into the background of public discourse by the time Die Blechtrommel was published in 1959 29. For those attempting to negotiate the crises of the war9 and defeat in their immediate aftermath, however, there were more immediate and pressing questions at stake, and the multivalent and powerful symbolic potential of the child figure offered a range of different means of working through the crises according to different ideological persuasion.…”