In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which Germans were not perpetrators, but victims: the Allied bombing campaign, expulsions of -ethnic- Germans, mass rapes of German women, and postwar internment and persecution. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Sebald's The Air War and Literature and Grass's Crabwalk are key texts, but there are many others; the great majority seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to balance German victimhood and German perpetration....
In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which Germans were not perpetrators, but vi...