Germany Ponders

The Nation has an excellent round-up of the writing emerging from Germany and dealing with the German people's experience as survivors of World War II, from the firebombings to the mass rapes. It's a complex moral house of mirrors, but I'm pleased to see the Germans finally tackle the last piece of the Third Reich puzzle: "what happened to us, and how we came through it." They have a right to question the morality of the firebombers and the rapists, even as they accept the collective guilt of the Holocaust. The writing is both old works rediscovered and new ones written in both fiction and non-fiction. And much of it originates on the political left, which, at least to the Nation, makes it more legitimate than the same questions asked by those on the right.