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The need for tradition and heritage thus remains an unresolved issue in the first wave of Väterliteratur. This helps to explain why a new version of the genre has become popular in German literature since the late 1990s: the repressed longing for tradition now resurfaces in terms of a transgenerational legacy that requires further working through. 13 Analyzing the genre’s characteristic oscillation between rupture and continuity, this chapter demonstrates that many of these narratives locate the need for a break with the past in a particular form of masculinity.

The chapter adopts an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the symbolic value of resistance from the post-war period to the present day. I deal first with the changing historical paradigm and its interaction with wider public debates; I then discuss the representation of resistance in the Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand (GDW) in Berlin, before turning to a range of literary examples, including Wibke Bruhns’s Meines Vaters Land (My Father’s Country, 2004), Friedrich Christian Delius’s Mein Jahr als Mörder (My Year as an Assassin, 2004), Sibylle Mulot’s Nachbarn (Neighbours, 1995) and Michael Wallner’s April in Paris (2006).

And although Meckel’s first impulse is the desire for rupture, the force of his antagonism points to a latent desire for a family life that would be unaffected by the war and National Socialism. Motivated by the anxiety of influence, he engages in a narrative exorcism that aims to destroy all traditional forms of transgenerational solidarity. And yet, the flipside of such monologic gestures of self-proclamation and conflict is an underlying sense of loss of meaningful traditions and models of lineage.