The Holocaust, quite rightly, remains the defining event in the lives of several generations of Europeans, especially, of course, among Germans. While many choose to remain silent about the degree of their own or their family’s participation in or resistance to the Nazi regime, ever more fictional dramatizations of that nation’s struggle with collective guilt roll off the presses. The scale, like the horror, of this murderous bureaucracy defies even the most powerful imaginations, and few of the imaginations that grapple with this issue in fictional form are adequate to the task. Equally disturbing, many critics are reluctant to point out such novels’ flaws or are simply blinded to them by the topic’s sensitive nature.

Two of the post-Holocaust novels recently translated for US readers have long been available in Europe, where they were anointed with the usual collections of superlatives. Grete Weil’s Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat was first published in Germany in 1963, while Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, a relative newcomer, first appeared in Switzerland in 1995. Here their reception has been more tempered: generally positive with an occasional qualified reservation. Yet both fall far short of their aspirations. Instead of characters confronting moral issues of overwhelming complexity, we have two protagonists wallowing self-indulgently in their own suffering and, vicariously, in that of others.

Andreas, the once-promising but chronically blocked German poet in Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat, remains mired in the war. Now, years later, he cannot write anything because of a “wildly