I accept that everyone is focused on next year’s reading challenges but I have one last bit of unfinished #GermanLitMonth and #NovNov business to attend to.

I’m going to get straight to why Iris Hanika’s The Bureau of Past Management is such an interesting book – it captures so much of the ‘guilt’ that I have observed in German people my age. A few qualifiers – firstly, people my age did not live through the Holocaust. Secondly, I use the word ‘guilt’ hesitantly because it is far more complex than that. It’s sadness, a need for atonement, it’s fear, it’s shame, feeling accountable, and a sense of needing to repair something that is not their ‘doing’.

Most of the nation’s living citizens were not yet born when the crime happened… All the same, the monstrosity of their forebears’ crime weighed heavily on them, and when they approached this monstrosity, they expected nothing but to unmask their forebears and find criminals. They proceeded without hindrance – it was a continuous loop. The crime was so large.

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