‘Ehrlich, du lügst wie gedruckt’: Günter Grass's Autobiographical Confession and the Changing Territory of Germany's Memory Culture

This paper discusses the recent media‐fuelled controversy over Günter Grass's revelation that he served in the SS at the end of the Second World War. Analysing the different generational positions of the main actors in this debate, I argue that the controversy marks the end of the intellectual prominence of the Hitler Youth generation and a significant shift in German memory politics. The paper then analyses the key tropes that guide and justify Grass's confessional self‐enquiry. On the one hand, Grass makes autobiography the very site where Freudian deferral is enacted. The confession of an earlier omission thus becomes the very signature of autobiography. On the other hand, the narrative explores the fruitful traffic between biography and fiction, assigning the literary imagination a key role in the management of the past. While the narrative highlights the cultural productiveness of deferral, it also shows that fiction is ultimately an insufficient placeholder for the autobiographer's life story.