Discord Consensus

9 Thijs, ‘Holland and the German Point of View’, 193.
10 Reinjan Mulder, ‘Een koppige voorkeur voor de waarheid’, NRC Handelsblad, 5 November
1993, quoted by Vanderwal Taylor, ‘Nature, Nurture, and Narcissism in Two Recent Dutch
“European” Novels’, 246.
11 For example Henry Rousso, Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing
Executioners (New York: Knopf, 1995).
12 Jolanda Vanderwal Taylor, A Family Occupation: Children of War and the Memory of World
War II in Dutch Literature of the 1980s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009);
Anette Waring, ‘Intimate and Sexual Relations’, in Robert Gildea, Olivier Wieviorka
and Anette Waring (eds.), Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: Daily Life in Occupied Europe
(New York: Berg, 2007), 100–​28; Monika Diederichs, ‘Stigma and Silence: Dutch Women,
German Soldiers and their Children’, in Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen (eds.), Children of
World War II: The Hidden Enemy Legacy (New York: Berg, 2005), 151–​64; Monika Diederichs,
Wie geschoren wordt moet stil zitten. De omgang van Nederlandse meisjes met Duitse militairen
(Amsterdam: Boom, 2006); G. Hirschfeld, ‘Bezetting en collaboratie. Nederland tijdens de
oorlogsjaren 1940–​45 in historisch perspectief’ (Thesis, Doctoral University Dusseldorf,
1980); J. C. H. Blom, In de baan van goed en fout? Wetenschappelijke geschiedstrijving over de
bezettingstijd in Nederland (Bergen: Octavo, 1983).
13 The way in which the novel was discussed in the 2012 edition of literature programme
Benali Boekt dedicated to it is suggestive of its importance within Dutch memory culture
and the challenge it posed to conservative visions of the national past in the Netherlands.
In the programme, historian Willem Melching describes The Twins as part of the ongoing
normalisation of Dutch–​German relations and suggests that the relativisation of German
guilt which takes place in the novel was taboo-​breaking, since it destabilised the binary idea
of Germans as perpetrators and the Dutch as victims.
14 Tessa de Loo, The Twins, 14th edn. (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1994), 434, trans. Ruth
Levitt, The Twins (London: Soho Press, 2001).
15 Thijs, ‘Holland and the German Point of View’, 193–​4.
16 Albert de Lange, ‘Mogen wij nog anti-​Duits zijn?’, Het Parool (6 November 1993), quoted by
Thijs, ‘Holland and the German Point of View’, 194.
17 A reassertion of memories of suffering within the public sphere took place in the 1990s
as part of a political and cultural shift towards shared trauma as common identity in
post-​unification Germany, with public figures such as Martin Walser, Günter Grass and
W. G. Sebald claiming to break taboos by writing and talking about the German experience
of war. Bill Niven, ‘Introduction’, in Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering
the Past in Contemporary Germany (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006), 1–​25 (6, 10). Foreign powers at first responded positively to the moves to remember
German suffering, with the United Kingdom raising funds to repair damage to the city of
Dresden and Germany invited to commemorations of the Second World War in 1995. Niven,
‘Introduction’, 19. A backlash against German suffering followed both within Germany and
abroad, with Tony Blair suggesting in 2005 that Germany risked assuming a culture of victimhood
and the Daily Mail suggesting that Germany wallowed in the role of victim. Niven,
‘Introduction’, 8; Paul Cooke, ‘The Continually Suffering Nation? Cinematic Representations
of German Victimhood’, in Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims, 76–​92 (77).
18 Thijs, ‘Holland and the German Point of View’, 194.
19 Lutz Kopenick, ‘Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and Holocaust in the 1990s’, New
German Critique 87 (2002), 47–​82; Fisher, ‘German Historical Film as a Production Trend’,
192; Belén Vidal, Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), 36.
20 Vidal, Heritage Film, 37; Fisher, ‘German Historical Film as a Production Trend’, 190.
21 Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2005), 39.
22 Fisher, ‘German Historical Film as a Production Trend’, 187.
23 Matthias Uecker, ‘National Identity for International Audiences? Identity Construction in
Post-​Unification German Cinema’, in Julian Preece (ed.), Re-​Forming the Nation in Literature
and Film: The Patriotic Idea in Contemporary German-​Language Culture (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2014), 137–​56 (139).
208
NOTES