'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

Pope Pius XII in Hochhuth‟s drama) as authors narrowed the scope of their inquiries to
their own parents. Authors born during the 1930s and 1940s sought clarity about their
backgrounds by investigating their relationships to their parents – most often their fathers
– and their parents‟ behavior during Nazism. This subject matter had a clear political
dimension, especially if the parents were compromised by their role in National
Socialism. The first and most noted work of the period, Bernward Vesper‟s Die Reise
(The Journey, 1977), was published six years after the author‟s suicide in 1971.
Bernward Vesper, son of the Nazi writer Will Vesper and lover of terrorist Gundrun
Ensslin, struggles to establish clarity about his own identity by attempting to deal both
with the painful memories of his relationship to his authoritarian father and his
relationship to his father‟s political past. The success of Vesper‟s novel provoked a
renewed interest in the past and a wave of Generationenliteratur, or “generation
literature,” in which authors confronted their parents‟ involvement in the Nazi past as a
necessary first step to authentic self-definition (McCormick, Politics 180-1). Some of the
most important works of this genre include: Elizabeth Plessen‟s Mitteilung an der Adel
(Message to the Aristocracy, 1976), which portrays the efforts of a young woman of
aristocratic background to come to terms with her father‟s traditional, authoritarian values
as she drives to his funeral; Ruth Rehmann‟s Der Mann auf der Kanzel (The Man on the
Pulpit, 1979), which questions how the author‟s father, a Protestant pastor in a rural
village, could have collaborated with German fascism and how he could have kept silent
about a crime committed by Nazis in the village where he lived; Christoph Meckel‟s
Suchbild. Über meinen Vater (Image for Investigation about My Father, 1980), which
traces the portrait of Meckel‟s father, a struggling artist, who in the period of the “Third
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