The popular culture alibi: Bernhard Schlink's detective novels and the culture of politically correct Holocaust literature

Though Holocaust remembrance may be a high priority for official German culture, popular entertainment seems to have evaded this onerous burden. This essay takes Bernhard Schlink's popular detective novels-in particular the Selb-trilogy-as a case in point, arguing that 'mastering" the Nazi past appears in these stories to be a quite achievable task. Over the course of three novels, the loveable Gerhard Selb not only rehabilitates himself, but contributes in larger ways to the normalization of contemporary German culture. Drawing on Ernst Bloch, the articles suggests that the genre of detective fiction is itself implicated in this normalization strategy. Finally, Detective Selb is viewed as a prototype for the characterization both of Hanna Schmitz and Michael Berg of Der Vorleser; the essay argues that a consistent ideology governs all these works.