The War in the Empty Air

W. G. Sebald offer evidence that these submerged memories are surfacing. Taking account of these developments, Barnouw examines this debate about the validity and importance of German memories of war and the events that have occasioned it. Steering her path between the notions of avictima and aperpetrator,a Barnouw seeks a place where acknowledgment of both the horror of Auschwitz and the suffering of the non-Jewish Germans can, together, create a more complete historical remembrance for postwar generations. Dagmar Barnouw is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California, and author of Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity, Germany 1945, and Naipaul's Strangers (all Indiana University Press), among other books of cultural criticism.