Madam, - I would like to take issue with a view expressed in Kieran Fagan's "Berchtesgaden Letter" in your edition of September 9th.
He writes: "Not for the first time, I wonder about the futility of asking modern Germany to explain Nazi Germany to the rest of the world." And further down he notes: "Modern Germany has moved on, but if it cannot explain its past to us, who will?"
While he may be right about the Nazi past being airbrushed in the Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden, as an assessment of post-war German culture his remarks are way off the mark. At least since the late 1960s, when the student movement forced the issue of the country's Nazi legacy on to the political and cultural agenda, German culture has been consumed with the debate about the disaster which National Socialism spelt for Germany and the Germans and with attempts to explain how it could have happened. The most notable literary successes in the recent past, by Günter Grass, Bernhard Schlink and W.G. Sebald, all deal in one way or another with Germany's Nazi legacy. Equally, the major post-war cultural controversies, such as the famous Historikerstreit of the 1980s or the recent heated debate about the Holocaust memorials, are proof of how live the issue of National Socialism continues to be.
German scholarly books and articles about the social and economic factors contributing to the rise of National Socialism would fill several libraries. Why, then, does Mr Fagan claim that the Germans are unwilling to explain their Nazi past? If we consider that the overwhelming majority of books about the Nazi period reviewed in the English-speaking world are by British and American authors, perhaps the question should be posed differently: why does the outside world care so little about how the Germans themselves explain their past?
Only a tiny fraction of the intense German debate about National Socialism over at least four decades has been translated into English, and if he does not know German Mr Fagan may therefore perhaps be forgiven for his ignorance. With the numbers of Irish students taking German falling dramatically in recent years, it is unfortunately not likely that in this country we will soon hear any more clearly what the Germans have to say about themselves and their history. But this can hardly be blamed on the Germans. - Yours, etc.,
Dr JOACHIM FISCHER, Senior Lecturer in German, Department of Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Limerick, Limerick.