World View: The lives of three extraordinary German intellectuals coalesced this week in a lively moment of Germany's memory theatre where past meets present.
Günter Grass was in Berlin to read from his autobiography, in which he admits being a teenage Waffen-SS soldier; prominent Third Reich historian Joachim Fest died a week before his own memoir was published; and Pope Benedict made what was probably his final visit home to Bavaria.
All three men, born within months of each other in 1926-27, belong to the so-called "Flakhelfer" generation who were dragged as teenagers into the already lost second World War and who were lucky to escape afterwards, alive, blameless but traumatised.
The three men tell similar tales of those horrific months, yet only now is it clear how their different paths in the war and in their subsequent lives were influenced by their starting points.
Particularly interesting are the similar starting points of Ratzinger and Fest, despite growing up in opposite ends of the country.
Ratzinger was born in the Bavarian village of Marktl and raised in the town of Traunstein by strictly religious parents. His father went to Mass three times each Sunday and he carried baby Joseph to the church on Easter Saturday, five hours after he was born, to have him baptised in the water freshly blessed for that evening's Easter vigil Mass.
Joseph snr rejected the nationalist "Reich" stream of Bavarian politics at the time in favour of Francophile-Catholic influences and Joseph jnr told later how Nazism "went against the grain" of his father, a subscriber to the anti-Nazi newspaper Der Gerade Weg (The Straight Path). After Hitler seized power, Joseph Ratzinger snr took his two sons on long hikes and Joseph jnr remembers how he was convinced by his father's "religion and antagonism towards the regime".
Despite a meagre income as a retired policeman, Joseph snr scraped together the tuition fees to send his boys to board at a Catholic seminary, one of the last places they were away from Nazi indoctrination, at least for part of the day.
Fest, in his memoirs Not Me, tells of his similarly influential father who "prevented me and my siblings from becoming Nazis".
Johannes Fest was a strongly Catholic Social Democrat, a convinced republican and a virulent anti-fascist who wore his Nazi-imposed teaching ban as a badge of honour.
He inoculated his son against the creeping fascist influence from an early age, bringing him at the age of six to watch the Reichstag burn in 1933 and allowing him to sit in on late-night discussions with anti-fascist friends.
Four decades later, Fest became a giant of Germany's intellectual elite and, under his editorship, made the feuilleton pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper the must-read intellectual newsletter.
Considering his family background and his wartime experiences, it was a bitter irony to be branded a Prince of Darkness of the Third Reich by left-wing intellectuals. They accused him of suffering from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome after years researching his ground-breaking biography of Adolf Hitler and months locked in with Albert Speer in his Spandau prison cell, working on his memoirs.
A similar suspicion hung over Joseph Ratzinger's election as pope last year.
In Britain and Ireland, there was a widespread view - common to the Sun's "Hitler Youth to Papa Ratzi" headline and several Irish left-wing commentators - that Ratzinger was guilty by association, however slight, with the Nazi youth movement.
The archives of the time show a different picture, of how the priests at the seminary kept their charges out of the Hitler Youth for as long as possible.
Of course the real irony is that the only one of the three men not to be tainted with Nazi allegations over the years, Günter Grass, himself volunteered for the Waffen-SS to escape what he called his "stifling" home.
He secured his existence as a novelist and a loud, left-wing moralist by admitting only the partial truth: that he had allowed himself to be taken in by the Nazis, saw nothing wrong with the Waffen-SS and was convinced the Endsieg - "Final Victory" - was near, even after Hitler's suicide.
Despite their different starting points, the three men share a common belief that their wartime experiences put them on their respective paths.
Grass said he perceived his secret Waffen-SS membership as a "stain" from which his six-decade career is an attempt to "draw the consequences".
In December 1945, after starting down the road that would lead to the Vatican six decades later, Ratzinger wrote that he had gained a deeper understanding of the "beauty" of the priesthood "than would have been possible under normal circumstances".
Behind his homilies in Germany this week was the voice of experience that had "learned to recognise the pathologies and the life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason, and the ways that God's image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism".
Fest, too, made clear that his Wehrmacht experiences drove his lifetime hunt for the causes of the National Socialist phenomenon.
"We of the Flakhelfer generation . . . were dragged into the Nazis' great historical crime, some more than others," he said in his last interview.
"If one wasn't entangled then one had great luck or - like me - great parents. This generation has never been able to rid itself of this inheritance. But many, a great many, have for precisely this reason made something good out of it."