This study deals with the literary treand known as ‘Väterliteratur’: The successful ‘Väterbücher’, most of which were published in the 1970s, are commonly thought to be manifestations of confrontations with fathers who were possibly complicit in Nazi crimes and who symbolically represent this problematic past. The whole genre is usually considered to be an ancillary phenomenon to the so-called ‘Neue Subjektivität’. The book raises the question whether these terms and classifications are actually meaningful and helpful in reading and understanding the ‘Väterliteratur’. On the basis of extensive textual analyses coupled with critical re-evaluations of existing scholarship on the subject, the study calls into question the suitability of ‘Väterliteratur’ as a concept in literary history and proposes alternative approaches to the works the term encompasses.

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