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Victim or perpetrator: the portrayal of kindersoldaten in the juvenile literature of the Adenauer Era.

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During the Adenauer Era, which encompasses the immediate post war era to the early 1960s, a general reluctance to discuss the Nazi past critically and as a consequence, to develop valuable theories of fascism was prevalent in the German population. One was all too keen to forget the horrid experience of the war and the dictatorship and, instead, to concentrate on rebuilding Germany. A restorative political climate and a failed denazification process supported this development. For the depiction of war in the literary medium during the Adenauer Era, this climate proved to be significant. First in the Western Sectors and later in the Federal Republic two different types of written accounts were particularly well received by the majority of German readers as high publication numbers indicate. To the first category belongs literature that depicts the role of the Germans as victims of National Socialism. The second category is comprised of autobiographies by famous German World War II "heroes" in book form or as a serial publication. The most striking example in this context is the Landser series, which is still published in today's Germany (Deutsche Literatur 375).

In contrast to this popular apologetic literary type a small number of writers, in particular those of the Gruppe 47, such as Heinrich Boll and Hans-Werner Richter, propagated a new verism in German post war literature. Their goal was to demonstrate to the Germans their personal responsibility in the rise of fascism and their disgraceful entanglement in the Third Reich. Within the realm of notable exception to the stream of apologetic war literature fall autobiographical accounts of juvenile soldiers who participated as members of the Hitler Youth or regular German Armed Forces in World War II. In labeling their works explicitly "juvenile literature," these young writers and their publishers attempted to target in particular the young reader with the aim to educate the latter and with the attempt to explain the success of the Nazi indoctrination of their generation. A comprehensive listing of the works which still defies completeness comprises the following works (years of publication in parenthesis): Helmut Altner's diary Totentanz Berlin: Tagebuchblatter eines Achtzehnjahrigen (1947), Klaus Hubalek's diary Unsre jungen Jahre: Tagebuch eines Zwanzigjahrigen (1947), Dieter Meichsner's text Versucht's noch real mal mit uns (1948), and Manfred Gregor's autobiographical novel Die Brucke (1958).

The eagerness of these former young soldiers to approach this sensitive literary topic despite opposing forces in society exhibits a twofold desire. First, it is an evidence of the willingness to make a conscientious attempt to explore the factors that led to the: own involvement in the National Socialist war. It also exhibits the young writer's eagerness to paint an unembellished deterrent to war and to express his feelings of belonging to a lost generation-similar to the sentiment of the World-War-I generation as preeminently expressed in Remarque's novel Im Westen Nichts Neues.

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