The lecture will show that the German postwar culture was constitutively characterized by a difference of memories - a difference which was realized by the majority of the non-Jewish Germans as a competition to win. This difference was rooted in the different experience of the Third Reich: Whereas most of the Germans participated in manifold ways in the Third Reich and the war - as party-members, as fellow-travelers, as soldiers, as perpetrators -, the Jewish experience of the Nazi era was formed by misery, exile, perpetration, loss. Already in its very beginning, German postwar literature tried to expel this different memory of the Nazi years from the project of a 'new' German literature as a national narrative. Although the tiny group of Jewish writers of German language who have been active in the postwar decades never have had a real chance to predominate this narrative, a precise reading of the German postwar literature and its discourses reveals the central meaning of this specific competition - and of the other memory which never should be really admitted to German postwar culture.

Stephan Braese, born 1961. Studies of German literature, history and didactics of higher education at University of Hamburg. Erstes Staatsexamen 1987. Dr. phil. 1994. 1994/95 grant of the Kurt-Tucholsky-Stiftung Hamburg (New York, Tel Aviv/ Jerusalem). 1995-97 Postdoc-Fellow of Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at Hebrew University Jerusalem. 1997-2000 Lehrbauftragter at University of Hamburg and University of Bremen. 2000 Habilitation. Since 2000 Privatdozent für Neuere deutsche Literatur at University of Bremen. 2002 Gastprofessor fuer interdisziplinaere Holocauststudien at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitaet Frankfurt am Main. 2002/03 Vertretungsprofessor für Neuere deutsche Literatur mit dem Schwerpunkt 18. und 19. Jahrhundert at University of Bremen. Numerous publications on German exile literature, German postwar and contemporary literature and literature of the enlightenment. Die andere Erinnerung - Juedische Autoren in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsliteratur, Berlin 2001. Most recent: ed. (with Werner Irro), Konterbande und Camouflage - Szenen aus der Vor- und Nachgeschichte von Heinrich Heines marranischer Schreibweise, Berlin 2002.