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Nostalgia, we are told, is in the business of idealizing the past. Because nostalgia is routinely associated with the falsification and distortion of memory, any discussion about its role in Holocaust representation is fraught with ethical concerns. What purpose can nostalgic sentimentality serve in evoking the reality of the genocide? This essay argues that nostalgia's power to falsify, distort, and sentimentalize the past can be productively and self-consciously mobilized to explore the mechanisms of both remembrance and suppression of memory. As I demonstrate through the readings of Danilo Kiš's Family Circus and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood, because nostalgia raises questions about the possibility of recovering the past, about the dynamics of projection and recuperation, and about the continuity of the self, fictional texts stage nostalgic homecomings precisely in order to confront the realities of both Jewish persecution and Nazification. Nostalgia, in other words, serves not only as mechanism for working through traumatic memories, but as a catalyst for a critical examination of the past.

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This article revisits the complex historical and methodological issues that surround the study of the Bildungsroman both within German literature and in a broader comparative context. It argues that the unusually narrow and well-defined circumstances of the Bildungsroman’s rise in eighteenth-century Germany contributed to the persistence of a normative and often-essentialist understanding of this genre. The article further identifies the limitations of this understanding, which at once generates a fair amount of critical frustration and hinders the use of Bildungsroman as a comparative term. The article proposes an alternative understanding of the Bildungsroman as a genre capable of transcending the context in which it originated and of leaving behind the very notion of Bildung. The genre functions as something like German literature’s disobedient child, one that we persistently attempt, and persistently fail, to discipline. This article suggests that we might wish to abandon this futile disciplinarian practice altogether.