What is there left to say about the memory of the Second World War in Germany? This is the question that any scholar writing on the topic must confront, given the enormity of the existing literature. In Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany, Maja Zehfuss succeeds in finding something new and provocative to add. Through a reading of German war novels—novels that deal not with the Holocaust but primarily with the suffering of Germans themselves—Zehfuss tries to show why the “agreed and politically acceptable terms of the debate” about memory of the Second World War are problematic (p. 77). Specialists will immediately recognize just how controversial this starting point is given Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance. For non-specialists, Zehfuss's repeated attempts to distance herself from the historical revisionism of the extreme right and multiple justifications for her strategy of “setting aside the Holocaust and treating the war as central” provide sufficient clues that her argument is meant to be deeply unsettling (p. 28). Indeed, her central goal is to “overturn” the accepted narrative of the war years, a narrative that she claims is not only used to justify the deployment of German armed forces but also to help legitimize the United States' military interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Ignoring German suffering and casting the Second World War as a “good war” that was fought to vanquish absolute evil allows one, Zehfuss argues, to turn a blind eye to the suffering of civilians in contemporary conflicts. That she is willing to reach this conclusion based on her reading of German war novels certainly says a great deal about Zehfuss's own politics. Whether the book sheds any light on The Politics of War in Germany, as its subtitle promises, is another question.

Zehfuss writes elegantly, and although her reliance on the ideas of Jacques Derrida will immediately limit her readership among political scientists, she keeps poststructuralist jargon to a minimum. The heart of the book consists of four chapters, each of which analyzes one or more war novels by well-known figures—such as Günter Grass, Martin Walser, and Kurt Vonnegut—as well as by more obscure writers, such as Gert Ledig and Harry Mulisch. These chapters all begin with a particular public debate about the memory of the Second World War and offer just enough historical detail so that non-specialists can follow them. The analyses of the novels then seek to demonstrate how the dichotomies or categories that frame that debate are problematic. Chapter 2 uses Grass's novella Im Krebsgang (“Crabwalk”) to analyze the memory of the suffering of German expellees from Eastern Europe and to problematize the opposition of remembering and forgetting. Chapter 3 turns to the strategic bombing of German cities and seeks to undermine the categories of perpetrator and victim using Ledig's novel Vergeltung (“Retaliation”) and Mulisch's Das steinerne Brautbett (“The Stone Bridal Bed”). Chapter 4 uses another work by Ledig—Die Stalinorgel (“The Stalin Front”)—and Martin Walser's Ein springender Brunnen (“A Gushing Fountain”) to interrogate the dichotomy of truth versus myth in the context of the debate about the crimes of the German Wehrmacht. Chapter 5 turns to the question of whether May 8, 1945, should be labeled a liberation or a defeat. Here Zehfuss analyzes Uwe Johnson's four-volume Jahrestage (“Anniversaries”) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five to undercut—with the help of Stephen Hawking—linear notions of time and, by extension, any fixed interpretation of events such as the date of the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.

One of the central arguments tying these analyses together is that although politicians regularly invoke memory to legitimize certain courses of action, these memories turn out to be “controversial, challenged by alternative memories, impossible to pin down” (p. 122). Despite the rich, Derrida-inspired discussion of truth, ethics, authenticity, knowledge, etc., it is not clear that another book on German war novels was required to demonstrate this point. The notion that politicians routinely simplify—and indeed abuse—history and memory in the service of contemporary political goals is hardly controversial, and the reader is left wondering why Zehfuss makes so much of German leaders compressing history into sound bites. It is a relatively straightforward exercise to expose flaws in the justifications that politicians give for any policy, whether these justifications are based on memory or on something else. In this sense, the repeated observation that memory “cannot deliver the certainty that is desired” is both true and obvious (p. 3).

What really appears to motivate Zehfuss's analysis is her resistance to a discourse on the Second World War that rules out potential objections, such as that the Germans suffered as well, that May 8 was not in fact a liberation, and that the German soldiers were both victims and perpetrators. Yet, in seeking to challenge the “accepted representation” of the Second World War (p. 239), Zehfuss is forced to concede that there is some structure to German memories, a position that would seem to conflict with her assertion that “there is no agreed, acceptable Second World War memory; there could not be” (p. 225). Zehfuss is nearly silent on the politics that produced this consensus, as she is on most questions that political scientists would find interesting about memory, such as how it is produced, whose interests it serves, and exactly how it is related to other contemporary political issues. This is frustrating for a book that carries the subtitle The Politics of War in Germany.

Although hinted at throughout (particularly in the preface), it is really only in the concluding chapter that Zehfuss lays out the political stakes of German war memories. Simply put, she is concerned that memories of the Second World War are being used—in Germany and elsewhere—to justify war. The problem lies in representing the Second World War as a “good war” in which an exclusive focus on German crimes—the scale of which Zehfuss never denies, to be clear—rules out the memory of German suffering. “If it was possible to fight a good war against the Third Reich, liberating Germany and indeed Western Europe, with merely insignificant—for Germans are to ignore it—collateral damage, then it may just be possible to do so again, perhaps indeed in Iraq” (p. 252). This is a bold and intriguing claim. Unfortunately, both this point and her observation that the recent attention to German suffering in the Federal Republic “may go some way towards explaining why [Germans] have not bought into Bush's rhetoric on the ‘war on terror’” remain at the level of speculation (p. 237). While critical theorists will certainly appreciate Zehfuss's close readings of German war novels, political scientists coming from outside the poststructuralist paradigm would have wished that the political stakes of memory would have been better developed, even if the author is unwilling to make causal claims or consider her book as a contribution to “knowledge.”

In sum, this is a controversial, challenging, and often fascinating book that raises many important questions about Germany's culture of remembrance. Potential readers would be advised to view it as a contribution to the public debate about memory of the Second World War in Germany and elsewhere—as an “intervention,” in Zehfuss's terms (p. 26)—rather than as a social science work in the positivist tradition.