The present contribution is mainly aimed at retracing some pivotal elements of the debate on “German collective guilt” in the last two decades of Germany’s cultural history. The search for truth about the past has complex implications; yet it is thanks to historians and writers, such as Wehler and Frei, on the one hand, and Sebald, Kempowski, Walser and Grass, on the other, that the problem of “collective sufferings” could be brought into sharper focus, including the loss of civilians due to air bombings against German cities. Dagmar Barnouw, an eyewitness to the bombings of Dresden, has therefore called for a “renegotiation” of collective guilt, critically facing what she has defined the supra-historical status of Auschwitz crimes. The semantic field articulated by terms such as “Last”, “Scham”, “Schande” as synonyms for “Schuld” testifies to strong emotional distress on the part of the subject, but also to an ongoing attempt to consciously or unconsciously overcome the obsession with memory, setting the future free from the past. Forms of real guilt removal or guilt usage for propaganda purposes between East and West Germany in the aftermath of WW2 are taken into account in the second part of the essay. And this not only to show the twofold stance of moral issues at stake, but also to identify the milestones of historical reconstructions in cinema, literature and theatre at the time when the trauma of the war was still recent.
