appropriated by the second – i.e. the ‘68 – generation (with the RAF very much part of this generation, and ample proof of “failed performance”), but it also leaves out of consideration the next generation, who have inherited the same traumatic mandate of mastering the past, but now so removed from first-hand experience of the events, and the guilt they are expected to internalize, that their Holocaust memory, as civic duty and part of the national identity, has to reconstruct itself within an even more complex set of allegiances and sensitivities. On the one hand, they know what to think, the Holocaust being part of the school curriculum; on the other, they – like members of their generation elsewhere in the Western world – have to overcome their remoteness in time by seeking some form of affective engagement or empathetic investment, in order to “remember” the Holocaust in the proper way, which is to identify with the victims. Equipped with the same default values I mentioned above, they watch films, go to Holocaust museums or attend commemorative events and expect to be moved by the means and in the manner they are accustomed to, which are inevitably cinematic. This brings me to my final two points: if the means of today’s affective engagement are those of television and mainstream cinema, then my supplementary argument, which I make only in the margins of this study, because I am not primarily concerned with either television or blockbusters, is that it is the media themselves that produce memory as trauma: through ‘breaking news’, the 24 hour news cycle, the permanent repetition of images of disasters whenever and wherever these strike, and above all, when reporting on wars as well as of natural catastrophes, putting the focus solely on the victims as victims, who are then harvested for their expressions of shock, grief and trauma. Such a scenario – which also includes reporting on politics increasingly concerned with catching politicians catching each other out on gaffes and Freudian slips, i.e. parapraxes, failed performances – makes for a form of spectatorship/ spectator-sport that can only navigate between trauma and disaster-fatigue, between over-investment in the many kinds of wretchedness in this world, and under-investment, that is, coldness and numbness to any sort of feeling other than cynical withdrawal. Spectatorship thus returns us to the pathological affectivity of trauma itself: between feeling too much and feeling nothing at all. It is almost impossible, in these circumstances, not to see oneself as victim, by empathizing with victims “out there”, but also because one cannot but experience one’s own helplessness and disempowerment as a form of victimhood. Yet at the same time, who can avoid in such a situation to not also feel guilty: guilty in the face of the misery and pain of others, guilty by having it so (relatively) good; guilty even, because suspecting that we carry some of the responsibility for the persistence of suffering and

injustice. In short: such a form of spectatorship may require its own kind of guilt management and may itself show symptoms of perpetrator trauma. To a traumatogenic television corresponds a parapractic cinema, as two sides of a crisis in agency, in the face of a generalized sense of guilt, with nowhere to go: not even the confessional – unless it’s a television talk show. Thus, if I feel obliged to devote a book to the cinematic and political consequences of Germany’s cross-generational guilt management, negotiating between perpetrator-trauma and perpetrator-memory, across denial, disavowal, over-identification and victim-status, then the German example of (not) mastering the past by means of the many metamorphoses of parapraxis holds another lesson: that a “coming to terms” and a reckoning with (our) guilt in the West is surely yet to come.