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From the fall of the Third Reich until today, the incredible has been testified to over and again. It just wasn't heard. Or was heard only selectively. Growing up in postwar Germany meant that you had the choice either to acknowledge the incredible or not (Hamburger 2015). and according to your choice, you lived on a different historical ground. Different stories. Different testimonies.
In part this was a question of generations: those who had witnessed war and genocide tended to repress it; their children, born after the war, tended to ask. and if you ask for the repressed, you don't get answers, you get reactions. in Germany, the “sixty-eights” (the generation that came of age in the late 1960s) deployed an “action-formation” (to coin a term) against their elders' reaction-formation against the incredible, the intolerable shame. the older generation used to speak not of the defeat, but of the “breakdown”—and, in private, war experiences were selectively recounted as stories of bravery or personal suffering.
The breach of generations created by the sixty-eights was expressed in Ernst Jandl's poem “Vater komm erzähl vom Krieg” (“Come, Father, Tell about the War”), culminating in the line “Vater komm erzähl wiest gefalln bist” (“Come, Father, tell how you were killed in action”). But in between these conflicting narratives and silences was a lost generation, the children of war. They had witnessed the war and, vulnerable as they were, had encapsulated these experiences much more deeply than their parents had. They had neither the maturity nor the cognitive ability to repress the experiences. They fell apart. It is mainly this generation whose memories are addressed in Eyewitnesses of the 1943 Hamburg Firestorms