INTRODUCTION: THE IMPLICATED SUBJECT IN POST-1945 GERMAN-LANGUAGE LITERATURE

Abstract

Drawing on Michael Rothberg's concept of ‘the implicated subject’, this special issue brings together articles that explore how German-language literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries negotiates the contested terrains of victimhood, perpetration, complicity, solidarity and their afterlives. The contributions investigate how literary texts articulate both individual and collective entanglements in systems of political, societal, colonial and sexual violence. They examine implication not only as a structural position but also as an affect: what does it mean to feel implicated?1 What aesthetic strategies and narrative forms render implication visible? How do texts implicate their readers, drawing them into ethical and mnemonic constellations that blur the boundaries between guilt, responsibility and solidarity?

In the German context, the analysis of implication is inseparable from the country's responsibility for the Shoah and the division of Germany in the wake of World War II. Literature's engagement with these histories remains central to debates about ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, but recent political shifts have contributed to reframing these discourses. Chancellor Olaf Scholz's 2022 declaration of a ‘Zeitenwende’ — a watershed moment in response to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine — marked not only a political and ideological shift towards increased military spending and military power but was also a turning point in German memory politics.2 Scholz's rhetoric reoriented national self-understanding by moving away from pacifist traditions rooted in Holocaust memory. In response, intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, as well as public forum debates, have re-examined earlier paradigms of remorse and reconciliation (Willi Brandt's ‘Ostpolitik’) and economic rapprochement for Eastern Europe and Russia (Angela Merkel's ‘Wandel durch Handel’), signalling that Germany's narratives of guilt, responsibility and solidarity are again being reshaped.3 More recently, cracks have begun to show in Germany's so-called ‘Staatsräson’, its unconditional commitment to supporting Israel. In the wake of 7 October 2023, Germany's relationship with Israel has become a focal point of public controversy, as critics increasingly question whether an unconditional interpretation of ‘Staatsräson’ can coexist with ethical accountability for civilian suffering and international law. In August 2025, after facing significant public pressure, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced the suspension of German weapons exports to Israel that could be used in Gaza. Following Israel's invasion of Gaza, popular opinion and heated discussion in the German public sphere have increasingly questioned what moral and political responsibility incurred for Germany's Nazi past precisely entails. This reconfiguration sets the stage for renewed inquiry into implication: how can historical responsibility be acknowledged while confronting present-day complicities in war, mass displacement and global inequality?

These debates are intensified by the passing of the eyewitness generation and the diversification of German society. Postmigrant perspectives on German memory culture have encouraged the inclusion of previously marginalised histories — such as labour migrations and experiences of (right-wing) racism and exclusion — and advocated for an acknowledgement of the cultural contributions of migrants to German-speaking societies. This also implies a thorough reconceptualisation of German identity and a recognition that plural and diverse backgrounds are fully part of the collective that remembers.

Along the same lines, an understanding of Holocaust memory that is constructed as unique, singular and the moral foundation of the nation has faced increasing challenges. Historian A. Dirk Moses has shown in his essay ‘The German Catechism’ how this interrogation functions as a rigid orthodoxy.4 Although it played a crucial role in the attempt to shape a responsible culture of Holocaust remembrance in the FRG after 1945, it has impeded necessary debates about other forms of historical violence, especially colonial genocide and structural racism, as well as rising antisemitism. For Moses, as for Rothberg, the insistence on Holocaust uniqueness can lead to a hierarchy of suffering that marginalises victims of other genocides and racialised oppression. In this context, the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa (1904–08) has come into sharper focus, prompting debates about comparative, multidirectional and entangled memories. Against zero-sum approaches that pit memories of different victim groups against each other, Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory (2009) has been especially influential in memory studies scholarship.5 Rather than viewing cultural memory as a finite resource under threat, multidirectional memory emphasises productive intersections and solidarities across histories of trauma. Aleida Assmann's dialogical memory, Astrid Erll's travelling memory, and Daniela Henke and Thomas Vanassche's co-memory similarly foreground reciprocal recognition and solidarity in remembering.6 At the heart of these concepts lies a challenge: how to navigate the ‘temptations’ of competitive memory without falling into facile equivalence.

The ongoing disputes about singularity, comparability and implication in German memory culture are best understood in light of the ‘Historikerstreit’ of the 1980s and its contemporary echo, often labelled ‘Historikerstreit 2.0’. The original ‘Historikerstreit’ erupted when conservative historian Ernst Nolte suggested that National Socialism should be understood as a reaction to Bolshevism and the Holocaust within the broader context of twentieth-century atrocities, specifically Stalinist crimes. Critics like Habermas interpreted such arguments as attempts to relativise the Nazi genocide and normalise German history.7 The ‘Historikerstreit’ thus centred on the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its place as the foundation of the Federal Republic's moral and political order, leading Habermas to declare ‘Verfassungspatriotismus’ as the only viable way to forge a German collective identity in a democratic society burdened by the Nazi past. Nearly four decades later, a new iteration of this debate — sparked by Moses's ‘The German Catechism’ and the 2021 publication of the German translation of Rothberg's Multidirectional Memory8 — revived questions about the singularity of the Holocaust. This ‘Historikerstreit 2.0’ emerged as a debate around transnational memory and postcolonial studies, and the diversification of German memory culture. Moses's and Rothberg's interventions challenged the dogmatic elevation of the Holocaust as incomparable, proposing instead that German memory culture must address colonial genocide, structural racism and global injustices.9 The ensuing controversy revealed deep divisions: while some scholars and commentators welcomed the expansion of German memory culture beyond the Holocaust, others feared a dilution of Holocaust centrality and a relativisation of antisemitism.

Like the ‘Historikerstreit’ and its twenty-first-century iteration, ‘documenta fifteen’ brought to the forefront unresolved questions about what constitutes antisemitism and of how to remember the Holocaust while also addressing colonialism, racism and global inequality. Even before the opening of the renowned Kassel art exhibition in 2022, ruangrupa, an Indonesian art collective and the first group from the Global South to curate ‘documenta’, was suspected of antisemitism. Shortly after the exhibition's opening, controversy erupted when a mural was unveiled that included caricatures widely interpreted as antisemitic. Heated disputes and broad public debates among the advisory panel, politicians and cultural organisations led to the resignation of the general director of ‘documenta fifteen’, reigniting controversies about how German institutions negotiate historical guilt by transposing it onto anti-colonial voices.10

Both ‘Historikerstreite’ and the controversy surrounding ‘documenta fifteen’ highlight the stakes of implication in Germany today. They expose the tensions between acknowledging historical specificity and confronting entangled histories of violence. Moreover, they demonstrate how scholarly debates resonate far beyond academia, shaping public discourse, state policy and the cultural frameworks through which literature itself is read and interpreted.

Rothberg's The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019) provides the conceptual foundation for our exploration of the nexus between implication and German literature, specifically. Rothberg challenges the triadic model of Holocaust and genocide studies — victim, perpetrator, bystander — as too rigid to account for indirect forms of agency that enable or perpetuate violence.11 Implicated subjects occupy what Primo Levi once described as the ‘grey zones’ of history: they are not perpetrators, nor are they simply passive bystanders. Instead, they are agents whose actions, inactions or structural positions contribute to and benefit from sustaining regimes of oppression. Crucially, Rothberg also highlights the temporal and geographical dimensions of implication. Subjects can be implicated in violence that is both synchronous and geographically distant, as well as being beneficiaries of historical violence in the form of expropriation, enslavement or genocide. While the postmemory generation — a generation shaped by inherited, rather than lived, memories of trauma — is not criminally liable in the sense of perpetrators or accomplices, as illustrated by the works of Ingeborg Bachmann, Eva Menasse, Dorit Linke, Antje Rávik Strubel and Christian Kracht discussed in this special issue, they inherit debts and responsibilities that demand ethical reckoning. In this sense, implication exceeds legal categories and insists on forms of political and moral responsibility. By confronting implication, Rothberg suggests that individuals acknowledge their indirect involvement in historical and structural injustices, which in turn enables forms of ethical solidarities that cut across national borders, lived experiences and fixed identity categories.

Among the questions the volume also raises is the extent to which authors inscribe their own implication in the fictional texts. The self-reflexive, autofictional experiments explored here — for instance, in texts by Bachmann, Rávik Strubel, Kracht and Maxim Biller — foreground the performative dimension of implication, exposing the vulnerabilities and ambivalences that structure second- and third-generation confrontations with the German and European past.

German-language literature since 1945 has been an important arena for negotiating implication. In the aftermath of World War II, writers such as Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Bachmann, Uwe Johnson and Peter Weiss explored the legacies of perpetration, complicity and victimhood in works that questioned the innocence of bystanders and the evasions of postwar society. Authors of the postmemory generation often grapple with inherited guilt, shame or silence. As this special issue and select contributions to two Parallax issues on implication demonstrate, literary authors have recently extended the inquiry into new terrains of implication: flight, migration, sexual crimes, surveillance, racism, environmental destruction and global inequality.14 They invite readers to confront not only historical violence but — as Jennifer Noji, Imke Meyer and Kristin Rebien argue in their contributions here — also their own participation in structures of privilege and exclusion.

In ‘Feeling Implicated: Affective Entanglements in Ingeborg Bachmann's “Das dreißigste Jahr”’, Meyer argues that read through the lens of implicated subjectivity, the short story's radical stylistic and affective hybridity emerges as a deliberate narrative strategy. The text dramatises the protagonist's entanglement in, and resistance to, historical and contemporary structures of injustice that implicate him in complex ways. At the same time, the story's formal and genre-based experimentation exposes its own connection to the exclusionary traditions of European literature and intellectual history. Because Bachmann's readership largely comes from the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’, the text also implicates readers, reminding them of their participation in the systemic inequities sustained by the Western canon.

Rebien examines the pedagogical potential of the concept of the implicated subject in young adult literature on East Germany. In ‘Implication in Young Adult Novels about the GDR: Historical Fiction for a Democratic Future’, Rebien argues that Dorit Linke's novel Jenseits der blauen Grenze (2014) avoids simplistic victim/perpetrator binaries by highlighting everyday complicity under authoritarian rule. Through fragmented narration and montage, the novel positions readers as active interpreters who must confront patterns of implication in ordinary social relations. In doing so, the novel offers especially young readers vital frameworks for recognising how individual choices sustain or resist authoritarian systems — an urgent lesson in today's political climate.

Noji's article in this special issue argues that Abbas Khider's Ohrfeige (2016) implicates readers in systemic violence against refugees through the formal strategy of the second-person ‘Sie’ address. Building on Rothberg's concept, Noji, in ‘The Implicated Reader: Abbas Khider's Ohrfeige Reckoning with the Refugee Crisis in Germany’, develops the notion of an ‘implicated reader’ who is positioned within structures of systemic and personal violence. Rather than inviting identification and empathy with victims, Noji argues, the novel challenges readers to confront their own potential complicity and responsibility.

The other novels under investigation in this special issue were all published in 2021, the same year as Rothberg's Multidirektionale Erinnerung and Moses's ‘Catechism’: Menasse's Dunkelblum, Rávik Strubel's Blaue Frau, Kracht's Eurotrash, and Biller's Der falsche Gruß. Taken together, these works mark 2021 as a watershed in the evolution of memory politics, as literature, historiography and polemical critique converged to unsettle ritualised forms of remembrance and to press the question of historical responsibility and implication with renewed urgency.

Kylie Giblett reads Menasse's novel as both a reflection of and a contribution to contemporary debates on Holocaust memory. In ‘“Die sogenannten kleinen Leute”: Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject in Eva Menasse's Dunkelblum’, she draws on both the implicated subject and multidirectional memory. She illustrates how multiple histories intersect in a small Austrian border town, revealing the promise and tensions of implication and multidirectionality. Giblett argues that by portraying a community of characters entangled in complicity, the novel demonstrates how collective implication sustains violence and its legacies across generations.

Friederike Eigler's analysis of ‘Gender, Power and Implication in Antje Rávik Strubel's novel Blaue Frau’ seeks to open a dialogue between the implicated subject and feminist scholarship. The novel addresses both structural and sexualised violence in Europe, showing how systemic inequities obstruct justice while also granting the protagonist partial agency. By moving beyond simple binaries of East/West and masculine/feminine, the text reveals forms of implication that exceed the victim/perpetrator divide. Its metafictional and autofictional dimensions, Eigler argues, foreground the author's own implication and cast Blaue Frau as a figure in an allegory of contemporary European power relations.

Karin Bauer's contribution reads Kracht's Eurotrash and Biller's Der falsche Gruß as parodies of implication. In ‘Affect, Autofiction, Parody: Negotiating Memory and Implication in Christian Kracht's Eurotrash and Maxim Biller's Der falsche Gruß’, Bauer argues that both novels probe the psychic burden of implication through humour, hyperbole, absurdity and unreliable narration. Kracht's picaresque journey and Biller's provocative ‘falscher Gruß’ highlight the performative and affective dimensions of implication, exposing both vulnerability and narcissistic wounds. As parodistic interventions in German memory culture, the novels also expose the ambiguities of autofiction, which implicates not only the narrators but also the authors themselves in the histories they recount.

In his response to the articles in this special issue, Rothberg situates them within the broader theoretical framework of the implicated subject. He emphasises that contemporary German-language literature provides a privileged site for exploring forms of implication that transcend the binary of victim and perpetrator. Building on the work of Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt and Levi, Rothberg differentiates between synchronic implication, in which individuals participate in and benefit from existing systems of inequality, and diachronic implication, through which subsequent generations inherit responsibility for historical violence and acts they did not commit. Rothberg argues that literary texts especially illuminate these complex entanglements by representing ambiguous moral positions and by formally implicating readers through narrative perspective, temporality, affect and modes of address. Commenting on recent and contemporary German memory debates surrounding Holocaust comparisons and the ‘Historikerstreit 2.0’, Rothberg makes the crucial point that, in the 1980s ‘Historikerstreit’, ‘comparison was a tool of the right’, as Nolte and others attempted to relativise Nazi crimes in relation to the Gulag. In the second dispute, however, he notes in his contribution, ‘comparison and relation were progressive methods that sought to expand German responsibility for historical violence’. Rothberg's forthcoming book with the subject-to-change title Holocaust Comparison Controversies: On the Use and Misuse of Historical Analogies (Princeton University Press) will undoubtedly elaborate on this point. Rothberg concludes his response by identifying unresolved debates surrounding German colonialism, the ‘Historikerstreit 2.0’, and the Israel–Palestine conflict as pressing future sites of implication. He argues that the evolving ‘literatures of implication’ will continue to challenge readers to confront the intersections of historical responsibility, present-day injustice and memory culture.

By situating German-language literature within the theoretical framework of Rothberg's implicated subject, this special issue intervenes in current debates about memory, implication and solidarity. Literature emerges as an important arena in which the complexities of implication — including its affective registers and ethical demands — are rendered legible. Against the backdrop of shifting memory politics, the decline of survivor testimony, and the globalisation of Holocaust memory, the articles collected here illuminate how literary texts compel us to reckon with the ambivalences of our entanglement in histories of violence. Confronting implication, these contributions suggest, may open pathways towards new solidarities and understanding that are attentive to the grey zones of history and committed to ethical engagement across national and ideological divides.