Have you ever dated a German man who happened to be a writer? No? Good for you. Not that I would recommend dating writers in general, who have a tendency to justify their worst behaviour as art. And honestly, why wouldn’t they? The canon is full of men who poured their raw misogyny into beautiful sentences and well-crafted compositions. In return some of these men had genius status conferred on them because, well, they wrote fiction and the misogyny was the fictional character’s, not theirs.
In German writing there is another unfortunate tradition: a hyperfixation on the inner world of the perpetrator. This focus goes beyond narrative perspective. It finds its way into essays and nonfiction writing. It finds its way into so many forms of writing that the perpetrator is sometimes transformed into the real victim of his own violence. That’s exactly what the Nobel prize winner Peter Handke did (OK, Handke is Austrian), in his revisionist account of the Bosnian genocide committed by the Serbs. And it’s what the recently deceased author Martin Walser did when he complained that not a day went by without Germans being hit with the ultimate “moral cudgel”, namely Auschwitz.
