After the Catastrophe

The Holocaust posed the most devastating question any literary tradition has faced: how do you write in the language that was used to organize genocide? How can German — the language of Goethe, Schiller, and Rilke — recover from also being the language of the Final Solution?

Günter Grass's The Tin Drum uses a child narrator to examine German guilt with savage, grotesque humor. W.G. Sebald blurred the lines between fiction, memoir, and documentary photography, writing prose that moves through history like a haunted traveler.