Rebecca SC French 602F2576 MA in German Studies - Rhodes ...

forgetting. Germany, following the collapse of the Third Reich, sought to focus on rebuilding
and reclaiming itself, but its restructuring, first into Allied zones and then into FRG and GDR,
could be seen as having only achieved further division and estrangement from a cohesive sense
of nationhood. Betts (2002: 543) refers to the fact that the GDR sought to create a distinct
political and cultural identity, basing it on the “vaunted and often mythic heritage of antifascist
resistance and non-complicity”, and “officially denouncing the Third Reich as the natural
offspring of „fascist capitalism‟”. Reunification following the collapse of the Berlin Wall nearly
twenty years ago, while repairing a physical and economic divide, in effect brought about a
marked cultural division with the emergence of what is now referred to as Ostalgie, a sentimental
nurturing of „lost aspects‟ of GDR identity. This sense of fragmentation could perhaps be seen
as having been alleviated by the common „bond‟ of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a burdensome
addition to the make-up of German identity as seen during the second half of the 20 th century.
The strong feelings of guilt and shame, both on a national and personal level and encouraged by
the rest of the world, became, for more than one generation, an integral part of what it was to be
German. 32 It is only recently that a new generation of Germans 33 has felt entitled to justly
„claim‟ the sufferings of its own people at the hands of the Nazis, Allies and, of course, the
Russians.
The glimpses I have provided into these facets of German identity – Bürger, émigré, Künstler, as
personified in Thomas and Klaus Mann, as well as the more individual aspects pertaining to their
personal lives – pave the way for the exploration, in the following chapter, of the theory of
intertextuality as a means whereby the Deutschsein of the Faustian figure will become firmly
established in the reader‟s mind.
32 A rather humorous take on this is the well-known “Whatever you do, don‟t mention the war” Fawlty Towers
episode, where Basil Fawlty, in his overzealous attempts to avoid any mention of the Germans‟ role in WWII
around a group of German hotel guests, instead becomes the perfect case study for Freudian slips or parapraxis, with
his every utterance on the most innocuous topics conveying an accusatory jibe.
33 See, for example, the 1998 bestseller Der Verlorene (Lost) by Hans Ulrich Treichel.
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