In the aftermath of the Second World War, both the allied occupying powers and the nascent German authorities sought Germans whose record during the war and the Nazi period could serve as a counterpoint to the notion of Germans as evil. That search has never really stopped. In the past few years, we have witnessed a burgeoning of cultural representations of this "other" kind of Third Reich citizen - the "good German" - as opposed to the committed Nazi or genocidal maniac. Such representations have highlighted individuals' choices in favor of dissenting behavior, moral truth, or at the very...
In the aftermath of the Second World War, both the allied occupying powers and the nascent German authorities sought Germans whose record during the w...