cold blood, in the knowledge that if he refused, he would be punished and another soldier would do the job anyway. As Friedhelm said ‘the war will bring out the worst in us’ (Generation War, 2014) – but are we to blame them or the war for that? The White Ribbon (a film released in 2010) also touches on the difficulty of assigning guilt. Of all the inhabitants, we are left asking ourselves who is actually guilty. The children (allegedly) committed the crimes, but that is only a result of their very difficult upbringing. Should we blame the parents then; the Pastor for his extreme harshness and the doctor for his abuse? The adults, however, are only behaving in a manner they see as normal. The Pastor is adhering to his view of Christian principles, and the doctor’s behaviour is sadly not unusual in such a patriarchal society. So who are we to blame? This carries parallels to the end of World War Two; everyone tried to pass the blame on, with the guilt travelling up the command structure to Hitler himself, who was, conveniently, dead. But Er ist wieder da , while comical in its presentation of Hitler as a person in today’s society, conveys an important message: Hitler was just one person, like any of us, and without mass popular support and cooperation he could not have created the Third Reich. The Reader is perhaps the most well-known German novel that attempts to deal with the problem of guilt. Hanna raises the issue of all those who worked for the Third Reich – she feels that she did nothing wrong 12 and claims that all she ever did was follow orders. She genuinely felt that she had no other choice – indeed, in the trial she asks the Judge in all honesty ‘what would you have done?’ (Schlink, 1997, p.110). In such a situation where she doesn’t understand what she has done wrong, how is it fair to condemn her? Furthermore, as a concentration camp guard, she carries much guilt. Yet she took to picking children, who she knew were soon to be killed, to read for her. Perhaps this was purely a selfish need, as an illiterate, to be read to, but maybe it was deliberately done to remove them from work and make their last few weeks more bearable. But the incontrovertible fact remains that she committed an unforgiveable crime. Michael also feels a sense of guilt, and in a way represents the generation of people that came after the war. Just like those who felt guilt for loving their parents and relatives, Michael ‘Loves Hanna…and the feeling of guilt is from Michael knowing someone who committed crimes like that’ (Shea, 2014). German artistic output on the topic of the GDR has not had as much time to establish itself, and I shall not spend as much time examining it. While German art about World War Two is mainly interested in guilt, a stronger theme in art regarding the GDR is that of trust. One theme which often arises in this artistic output is that of trust, and the almost total inability of anyone in the GDR to trust each other. In The Lives of Others Donnersmarck portrays a picture of a state surveillance apparatus that leaves no privacy for its victims whatsoever. In Barbara the titular main character is subjected to an endless series of searches and checks by the Stasi. German artistic output on the GDR, much like that on WWII, tends to portray the Stasi officials and reporters as altogether more human. With some figures estimating that one third of the East German population were Stasi informers, it is obvious for Germans that they were not all evil human beings. What is interesting to note, however, is the reverse of the usual chain of events for such a portrayal. We would expect to see the confluence of motivations and decisions through time that eventually lead to the character making their decision to work for the Stasi. However, such a portrayal, in its attempt to understand the motivations, would inevitably fall prey to the same criticism that it is seeking excuses. Instead, in The Lives of Others we see Wiesler first as a cold Stasi agent, and then the slow realization that he is human, like anyone else. Similarly in Barbara we are initially shown Stasi officer Schütz as a heartless human, who conducts house- and strip-searches at will. It is only later, when we learn that his wife is dying of cancer, that we feel sympathy for his position.
In conclusion, it is clear that, while perhaps not so much in popular, easy-to-read books, Germany’s
from execution. 12 One must remember that all Hanna needs do to refute the claim that she wrote the order is admit to her illiteracy – but she sees it as worse to be illiterate than to have committed the crime.
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