Childhood, Memory, and the Nation: Young Lives under Nazism in Contemporary German Culture

In the 1990s and 2000s, at a time when newly-reunified Germany seemed to be turning towards its future, public debates were dominated by those who had spent their early lives under Nazism and were still wrestling with the past. In this wide-ranging study of autobiographical writing, fictional accounts, and film, Alexandra Lloyd examines narratives of childhood and adolescence in the Third Reich within contemporary German cultural memory. The study sheds light on the broader context of post-reunification memory politics through close readings of primary texts by Günter Grass, Günter de Bruyn, Martin Walser, Ruth Klüger, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Günter Kunert, W. G. Sebald, Binjamin Wilkomirski (aka Bruno Doesseker), and Gudrun Pausewang, and filmmakers Dennis Gansel, Agnieszka Holland, and Cate Shortland. It provides a fuller picture of the way this historical experience continues to shape individual and national identity in the present.

Alexandra Lloyd is Fellow by Special Election in German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.