For good reason, there is currently a great deal of discussion about how a society that has lost its democratic freedom can find its way back. Less thought is given to what that “afterward” might actually look like in concrete terms. Here German literature offers suggestive points of reference. Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Böll, Heimito von Doderer, Georg Kreisler, and Ingeborg Bachmann wrote, from different perspectives, about what constitutes the framework of a society in which perpetrators and victims are forced by circumstances to live side by side, and silence about the crimes becomes an imperative that is meant to make society’s very functioning possible. Every “long night comes to an end, ” as the title of Alfred Döblin’s last novel has it—but what, in fact, does such a day after actually look like?
Daniel Kehlmann is an award-winning author whose internationally acclaimed novels, including Measuring the World and Tyll, have been translated into over forty languages. His latest novel, The Director, about the Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst and the Nazi era, is widely praised as one of the most important books of the year.
Johannes von Moltke is the Rudolf Arnheim Collegiate Professor of German Studies and Film, TV, and Media at the University of Michigan. He has published widely on German film and cultural studies, critical theory, fascism, and the rise of the new right.