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The Stale Specter of Nazism: Historical Burdens and Skewed Optics in F. C. Delius's Die Flatterzunge
Author(s) -
Broadbent Philip
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/j.1756-1183.2012.00151.x
Subject(s) - nazism , german , tel aviv , event (particle physics) , collective memory , history , art history , law , political science , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , library science , computer science
In 1997 the first trombone player of the Berlin German Opera signed his tab in a hotel bar in Tel Aviv “Adolf Hitler.” F. C. Delius's novel, Die Flatterzunge , fictionalizes this event in order to explore why an educated individual would wish to identify himself with Hitler. Set in the late 1990s, Delius's text exploits the real event in Tel Aviv to explore Germany's fetishized relationship to its past in the wake of reunification. While the text critiques the negation of history as an ethical compass for the collective, it also takes to task a collective obsession with the past that consistently frames how the present is seen. Framed in this way, the questioning of the historical optic challenges New Right revisionists who advocate individual memory in place of collective forms of remembering and at the same time asks whether history must continue to be the method of engaging with and representing contemporary Germany.