This essay analyzes a "certain German inability to mourn" (Santner, 1992, p.6) from the XIX century to the 1990-s and unification of Germany, mainly considering postwar period, and looking at it through the prism of "Antigone" and contradictory Syberberg's ideas.

Santner analyses "political correctness", characteristic for postwar German art and literature, referring to Greiner's idea that "the aesthetic value of works of art has been determined according to their moral and political use-value as symbolic purgatives of past and immunizations against future fascism understood not only as a politics but also as a state and structure of mind and imagination". Can this discourse be related to current Russian (and world-wide as well) discourse around "new ethics", "left/minorities dominance" and "tolerance", including, among others, debates about feminitives and correct language towards minorities?

This question is connected to the general theme of ethics (and "new ethics"), tolerance and censorship as well, as far as demand for correctness is often taken as an attempt to censor something or someone.

#history #Germany #art #postwar #WWII #censorship