For those subjected while growing up to endless black-and-white, Sunday afternoon films on TV of the official Anglo-American view of the Second World War here is a fascinatingly other version of that conflict. Not from the ‘German’ point of view but from the perspective of the war against Nazi barbarity, a more profound struggle than the apolitical crescendo of purely military campaigns and actions from defeat at Dunkirk to victory in Berlin that our cinema mindlessly celebrates.

In fact Hochhuth’s book is one of the most important postwar attempts by a German author to deconstruct the question of the individual and collective responsibility of German and Austrian citizens for the Nazi assault on the people of Europe.

A German Love Story is the romance between a young Polish forced labourer and a lonely German farmer’s wife, that ends in the execution of the Pole and with the German woman going to a concentration camp. In telling this story from the point of view of all the participants, including the city authorities responsible for organising the execution, Hochhuth raises a series of issues about public participation in the crimes of the Nazi period. Amongst these are; the enormous popularity of Hitler in Germany and Austria; whether the armed forces who fought for Hitler can disassociate themselves from what Hitler stood for by claiming to be simple soldiers defending the Fatherland and finally, the soft treatment given to Nazi officials like the ‘Peoples Court’ judges who sent many innocent people to death or imprisonment in an anti-judicial process but who have subsequently received generous state pensions in West Germany and Austria. A surprise amongst Hochhuth’s accusations, at least to this reader, an admirer of Switzerland’s democratic tradition, was the discovery that Switzerland regularly returned escapees from Germany to the Nazi authorities.

Like the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, Hochhuth is a leading postwar novelist and playwright, and like Bernhard he speaks with a kind of sustained disgust and bitterness at his own nation, not so much for what was done in the name of Germany but at the way that subsequently most Germans have sought to avoid and evade responsibility for these profoundly barbaric acts or behaved as if they are part of a distant past. While the Jews famously have, amongst the 316 Talmudic commandments, the obligation of a ‘Day of Atonement’ once every year, the Germans as a nation have yet to manage five minutes of atonement in the fifty years since the war ended. Perhaps that is the meaning of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’; as long as there is no demonstrable national repentance (either by the guilty generations or, failing that those that succeed them and bear the name ‘German’ — because who else?) it will take a thousand years before the adjective ‘German’ ceases to conjure up images that make the blood run cold.

‘Those words — «I had nothing to do with it» — are the most overworked of any uttered in Germany since Hitler’s death.’ p167