Echoes of Silence: The Politics of Generational Memory in East Germany’s Literary Intelligentsia

Abstract This article examines family memoirs and novels by children or grandchildren of East Germany’s literary founding generation. Written after reunification, this generational literature looks back on family life in the German Democratic Republic. It paints a group portrait of a distinct milieu in East German society and inside the Communist elite. Shaped by politics, habitus and social background, this milieu was stamped by German history, Jewish history and the history of Communism. A unifying thread runs through this family literature: intense generational dissonance stemming from parental silence about the Nazi past and the socialist present. In children’s memory, parents’ stories about exile clung to a narrative of victorious anti-fascist struggle and left out their suffering as Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe or as Communists in the Stalinist USSR. The article traces the postwar reverberations of silence about the past. Younger generations asked the founding generation who in the family survived, and how, and who did not survive, and why. How, they wondered, could parents condone socialist repression after resisting Nazi terror? Children confronted parental silence emotionally, culturally and politically, in a similar mode, the article argues, to the generational stance of 68ers in West Germany. In their discontent with anti-fascist parents, however, this group of East Germans shared the point of view of youth rebels in non-German Europe who challenged parents who opposed, not supported, National Socialism.